NineteenthCentury

The Magazine of the Victorian Society in America Volume 38 Number 2

Editorial

When I was one of Richard Guy Wilson’s students at The Victorian Society’s Newport Summer School about tenyears ago I fell in love with a woman. Her name was Marie. I met her at one of the grand houses that crowd Richard’sitinerary. It is called Clouds Hill, located north of Newport in Warwick, Rhode Island.

Since my wife, Susan, is my first reader and editor let me say right away that Marie died in 1863.Clouds Hill is a big, broad house on top of a steep rocky incline. It is built of local granite and features dramatic

wood eaves and extravagant barge boards. Its deep, three-sided porch overlooks an inlet off Narragansett Bay. It isa grey and brooding house, one that epitomizes what we think of as Victorian. Crossing the threshold, I felt an oddfrisson, wondering who had called this looming dwelling “home”–a question soon answered by Anne Holst, itscurrent owner and resident. She gave us an intimate tour of the house that had been in her family since constructionwas completed in 1872. It was built by textile magnate William Smith Slater, of Slatersville, Rhode Island, for his

daughter, Elizabeth Ives Slater, upon the occasion of her marriage to one Alfred Augustus Reed, Jr.It has passed down the matrilineal line to Ms. Holst and contains 150 years’ accumulation of the

family’s furnishings and fixtures. She runs the beautifully maintained house as a museum.Concerts, tours and events are regularly scheduled there.

Well do I remember the moment of my coup-de-foudre. We were touring the groundfloor. We had just seen the Egyptian Revival Reception Room dominated by twosensuously carved mahogany caryatids in the Egyptian style who supported a massivemantlepiece. Our group entered the parlor and I found myself face to face with apainting of a lively young woman in a bustled green silk dress leaning against agarden wall. I was completely smitten and asked Anne Holst who it was. “Oh, that isMarie, the sister of the original owner of the house.” Ms. Holst went on to explainthat the broken stem of the red rose Marie held in her hand was the key to theportrait. In Victorian shorthand, a broken stem signified that the person portrayedhad died. She noted that anyone in the nineteenth century, viewing this strikingtableau, would immediately understand that this was a posthumous portrait. Andyet the young woman in the painting looked quite alive and quite ready to step awayfrom her garden wall and take a turn around the grounds with me (chaperoned, ofcourse).

Aside from being in love, I was astonished. I had never encountered even the idea ofa painted posthumous portrait. Anne Holst said they were not unusual at the time. I knew

of photographs of the dead, and of death masks, but a painting? A painting takes time tocreate. Did you have to go engage the painter even before you called on the mortician? Did the

portraitist have to prop the body up to prepare a good likeness? Did he lay my beloved on the stonefloor and gaze down at her, painting swiftly before she started to–well, you know...

This was clarified when I called Anne for details. She told me the full name of the subject was Marie AmbrosineReed and that she was 19 years of age when she died. Based on a clear signature and date, Anne knows the last nameof the painter was Schwartze, and the work was done in 1864, a year after Marie died. All that is known about howshe died comes from Miss Reed’s diary, which is in Anne’s possession. The diary describes a journey by steamboatto Europe with her family for an extended vacation. While in Lausanne, Switzerland, the last entries in the diarydescribe two weeks of not feeling well. She died a week after the final entry, of unknown causes, and is buried inLausanne. As access to the body was impossible, the commission of the portrait was not rushed. For a likeness, thepainter was able to hew closely to an existing portrait of Miss Reed fortuitously painted shortly before her demise.

At that moment, in the dim, filtered light of the Clouds Hill parlor, I remember feeling tragic love and loss forthis stranger. I can describe it no other way. And though today I have a little trouble calling to mind the face of myhigh school girlfriend, Marie Ambrosine Reed’s image–and her broken-stemmed rose–remain vivid in my mind’seye. Such is the power of the posthumous portrait.

And so, we at Nineteenth Century bring you our issue on the theme of death wherein many of these mysteriesare explored and explained. We hope you enjoy your sojourn among the shades.

Warren Ashworth

NineteenthCentury hh

Cover: edwin romanzo elmer, MourningPicture, (detail) 1890. Courtesy SmithCollege Museum of Art, Northampton,Massachusetts.

VOLuMe 38 • NuMBer 2FALL 2018

EditorWarren Ashworth

Consulting EditorWilliam Ayres

Book Review EditorKaren Zukowski

Managing Editor /Graphic DesignerWendy Midgett

Guest EditorSara Durkacs

Printed by Official Offset Corp.Amityville, New York

Committee on PublicationsChairWarren Ashworth

Dennis AndersenWilliam AyresAnne-Taylor CahillChristopher ForbesSally Buchanan KinseyMichael J. LewisBarbara J. MitnickJaclyn SpainhourKaren Zukowski

For information on The VictorianSociety in America, contact thenational office:

1636 Sansom StreetPhiladelphia, PA 19103(215) 636-9872Fax (215) 636-9873info@victoriansociety.orgwww.victoriansociety.org

Decorating the DeadCOFFIN HARDWARE AND THE FAREWELL CEMETERY 2Melissa Cole and Laura Suchan

Funny EpitaphsA CENTURY-OLD LOOK AT SOME pOIGNANT AND AMUSING CARVINGS 8Elbridge H. Thompson and Warren Ashworth

Death MasksINTIMATE MEMORIAL TRIBUTES 14Eve M. Kahn

Remembering the Life in Death 18THE ROLE OF pORTRAITURE AND pHOTOGRApHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYMarie Carter

Bruce Price and the “Purely Greek” Tombstone 24Michael J. Lewis

Departments

41 The BibliophilistAnne-Taylor CahillJaclyn SpainhourRobert WojtowiczKaren Zukowski

47 MilestonesDR. SNOW AND THEBLUE DEATHAnne-Taylor Cahill

THE MAGAZINE OF THEVICTORIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA

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30 ReprisesBEATING THE BODYSNATCHERSAllison C. Meier

A TALE OF TWO GRAVESBridget M. Marshall

Contents

36 Preservation DiaryMAKING A MUSEUM: EUSTIS HOUSEKarla Rosenstein

About the Guest EditorSara Durkacs is the membershipsecretary for the Alumni Associationof the VSA and corporate secretary forThe Green-Wood Cemetery. Hung onevery inch of Durkacs’ office walls areVictorian paintings—a smattering ofThe Green-Wood Historic Fund’scollection of works of art by the morethan 400 artists interred at theCemetery. Durkacs collects vintagelinen postcards and takes long walksamong the dead at Green-Wood toavoid the living.

Advertisement for W. M. Raymond & Co., featuring the funeral procession of president Abraham Lincoln after leaving New York’s City Hall, c. 1866.published by Hatch & Co., New York.

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Decorating the DeadCOFFIN HARDWARE AND THE FAREWELL CEMETERY

Melissa Cole and Laura Suchan

Victorian attitudes towards death involved elaborate burialcustoms and rituals that were clearly defined and strictlyadhered to as much as finances and circumstances allowed.Magazines of the day, such as the Ladies Home Journal, oftencarried advice on the customs of mourning and what wasconsidered to be both acceptable choices in clothing andbehavior during the mourning period. Think of the reactionwhen the recently widowed Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with theWind accepted Rhett Butler’s offer to dance and you get someindication of how rigid and deeply entrenched the mourningculture was in the nineteenth century. This culture alsoextended to the graveyard where a visit to any nineteenthcentury example will reveal a variety of gravestone carvingsranging from willow trees to urns and cherubs. This visibledisplay of commemoration was a deeply personal choice andwas influenced to some extent by economic status and theperiod in which the stone was carved. What is not as visiblenow are the ways in which the Victorians ornamented andpersonalized the coffins of the deceased.

In the early days of settlement, the local cabinet andfurniture makers were tasked with the production and sellingof coffins. Already supplied with the necessary materials,furniture makers most likely found the coffin trade to be agood way to supplement their business in times when thefurniture business was slow. Luke & Brother of Oshawa,Ontario was one such company offering simple wooden coffinsin addition to the more mainstream furniture side of theirbusiness. This furniture and undertaking business was startedby members of the Luke family in 1853. The Luke brothers hada booming business in the furniture trade as more and morenew homes were built in Oshawa. The undertakingdepartment at Luke & Brother advertised professionalqualified staff, caskets and all requisites were carried.1 Coffinswere for the most part unadorned until the middle of thenineteenth century. After that it became the norm to decoratecoffins to create a totally unique look. As coffin decorationbecame more elaborate, it became less desirable to replicate

the exact look of another coffin. Soon furniture makers werebeing asked to undertake many of the funeral arrangements,including managing the funeral cortege and furnishing ahearse equipped with horses to carry the deceased. Luke &Brother advertisements in local newspapers offer the servicesof “undertaking” and funerals complete with hearse andhorses–alongside their furniture, engravings and frames. Astime went by many furniture makers began to dedicate part oftheir own business to laying out the deceased and providing asetting for the family to receive friends. For some, the funeralbusiness began to increasingly dominate the furniture trade.

Advertisement for Luke & Brother, Oshawa, April 1870.Luke Brothers storefront, Oshawa, Ontario, c. 1900.

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Coffin hardware was made from metal castings specificallymanufactured for coffin use. Funeral merchandise catalogueswere produced illustrating coffin and casket hardware andfuneral sundries. An example of one such catalogue comesfrom the Hearne Brothers and Company, of Whitakers, NorthCarolina which showcased an array of coffin hardwaredesigns.2 Companies, like Luke & Brother, would order piecesfrom similar catalogues for purchase through mail order orperhaps during a visit from a traveling salesperson to ensurethey had stock available as need arose. Name plates, coffinornaments, handles, cap lifts, escutcheons and coffin studscould be ordered from the catalogue in various finishes, stylesand colors to provide individuality to coffins. These finishingtouches could be ordered in a variety of designs and in manycases were ordered in complete “casket trimming sets”containing four handles, one name plate, two cap lifts, fourthumb screws, four screw plates and handle screws. Floraldesigns and depictions of animals (particularly sheep)predominate, however geometric flourishes were also popular.Most pieces of ornamentation were available in one’s choice ofsilver, gold, ebony, oxidize, brass and copper depending onpreference and budget.3

Coffin nameplates were decorative adornments attached tocoffins and often placed in the center. These plates may havethe name, birth and death date of the deceased inscribed onthem and came in many different shapes and sizes.Nameplates could also be ordered with common inscriptionssuch as “At Rest”, “Father”, “Mother”, “Rest in peace” and

“Our Babe.” Nameplates were made of different metals withlead, brass or tin being most popular. Their choice wouldreflect the status and wealth of the deceased. presidentAbraham Lincoln’s nameplate from 1865 was an elaborate

sterling silver shield adorned with a wreath at the top andengraved with his name, birth and death dates as well as thewords “16th president of the United States.” As nameplatesbegan to increase in popularity, they were often removed by

Casket trimming sets, as seen in a catalog published by Hearne Bros., & Co., Whitakers, North Carolina, c. 1890. Courtesy East Carolina University.

Coffin nameplate belonging to president Abraham Lincoln, 1865.

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loved ones to be kept as mementos of the deceased. Thispractice peaked in the late nineteenth century.

Ornamentation could also be purchased to reflectmemberships in organizations and religious ideals.Membership in fraternal or secret organizations was popularin the nineteenth century. It is estimated that two thousandsuch organizations were in existence at one time or another inNorth America.4 It is no surprise then the Hearne Brotherscatalogue featured coffin emblems representing several of themost popular organizations including Masons, Knights ofpythias, Oddfellows, Woodmen of the World and the JuniorUnited American Mechanics. The embellishments of theseorganizations were quite ornate and cast in great detail torepresent the logos of the organizations. On occasion, portionsof these ornaments were cast separately to render the effect ofbold relief, adding to the striking nature of the pieces.

For those not belonging to such organizations there wasstill plenty of ornamentation to choose from. In the nineteenthcentury, floral motifs were particularly popular. Many

examples are to be found throughout the Hearne Brotherscatalogue. For the Victorians, each type of flower had aparticular symbolism and careful thought was put into makingjust the right choice. Today much of the meaning associatedwith various types of flowers is forgotten but for the Victoriansflowers represented another way to communicate. InChristian iconography, the lily and the rose represent purity

and examples of foliage and fruit are suggestive of thelushness of heaven. The grapevine, a popular choice,represents Christ in the vine and followers in the branches.Ivy leaves refer to Christian constancy, laurel leaves to victoryover evil and palm leaves to peace, victory and excellence. Thedaisy symbolized purity and peace, and rosemaryremembrance. In addition religious images such as crossesand Bibles were also popular.5

Archaeological excavations of historic cemeteries haverevealed just how prevalent the use of coffin hardware wasduring the nineteenth century. In Oshawa, Ontario anexcavation in 1993 at one of the earliest cemeteries uncoveredseveral examples of coffin hardware which indicated theirstyles and use changed throughout the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century.

The Harmony Road (Farewell) pioneer Cemetery inOshawa, Ontario has been in use since the early 1800s.Initially the land for the cemetery was given by Acheus MoodyFarewell Sr., an early settler in the area for use as a family

cemetery. Farewell gave two of his sons, Acheus and William,a portion of the cemetery for their use as well as members ofthe Brown and Hinkson families. The cemetery was in useuntil 1937 and eventually came under the ownership of themunicipality and was officially closed to burials in 1968. Theold cemetery remained virtually unnoticed until 1993 when aplan to widen the north-south road adjacent to the cemetery

Coffin ornaments for Knights of pythias, Odd Fellows, Masonic, Woodmen of the World and Junior Order U. A. M., as seen in a catalog published byHearne Bros., & Co., Whitakers, North Carolina, c. 1890. Courtesy East Carolina University.

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uncovered 38 grave shafts located in the road allowance.Subsequent investigations revealed the cemetery hadencroached 8.5 meters into the original road allowancesometime during the late nineteenth or early twentiethcentury. An archaeological firm was hired to investigate and asa result the remains of 38 individuals were removed and re-interred within the cemetery bounds.6

Much of the coffin hardware uncovered at the FarewellCemetery was similar in style and variety to what wasadvertised in the Hearne Brothers catalogue and includedcoffin plates handles, different types of screws andescutcheons. Handles, used to carry the coffin, are of the swingbail or short bar types. These would be fastened to the coffinsides by lugs, which were usually decorative or by the use ofbacking plates and two or four screws. Thumbscrews had largewhite metal heads attached to an iron screw and were used tofasten the lid to the coffin. Thumbscrews were usually pairedwith escutcheons which were flat, decorative metal plates thatwere screwed to the coffin lid and used as a guide for thethumbscrews. After the lid was placed on the coffin, thethumbscrews were inserted through the escutcheons. Whitemetal coffin screws were used for coffin decoration and werebasic iron screws with ornamental white metal heads. Coffinstuds, made from tin, were four-sided, star-shaped or roundand were used to cover the screws or nails giving them a neat,

decorative finish. Before the practice of embalming becamemore established, coffin windows, formed by making a hole inthe coffin lid and covering it with a pane of glass werecommon. These windows were fixed in place and were used toview the body without having the coffin open.

The coffin hardware found by the archaeologists wascompared to that uncovered at similar sites. The assembledchronology used by the archaeologists illustrates not onlywhen certain coffin styles appeared but and also when variousdecorations were popular. previous cemetery research inOntario indicated rectangular coffins gradually replacedhexagonal coffins sometime after 1850. Also, about the sametime, coffins began to include increasing numbers of hardwareitems, beginning with two forms of plaques or nameplates,followed by swing bail handles (c. 1860), white metal coffinscrews (c. 1860 onward), tin studs (c. 1870 onward), viewingwindows and short bar handles (1878 onward), and finallyescutcheons and thumbscrews (c. 1881 onward). Thischronology of the coffin hardware was used by thearchaeologists at Farewell to help date the burials.7

Much like the Hearne Brothers catalogue, the coffinhardware from the Farewell Cemetery represented a greatcross section of styles and finishes. The range of variation inthe artifacts recovered from the graves at the Farewell site isremarkable for the number of burials uncovered. Of the 38

Clockwise, l to r: Grape leaf ornament, “At Rest” nameplate, thumbscrew and matching escutcheon, swing bail handle. The coffin hardware was foundduring an excavation of the Farewell Cemetery in 1993. Courtesy Oshawa Museum.

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graves excavated, 28 of the burials included nineteenthcentury coffin hardware in the form of engraved coffin plaques,swing bail and short bar coffin handles, decorative white metalscrews, stamped tin studs in various shapes,viewing windows, thumbscrews andescutcheons.

perhaps most interestingly, the Farewellsite revealed one item not seen in theHearne Brothers catalogue andpreviously unknown to the archaeologistsand a unique decorative treatment for theexterior of a coffin. The hardware piece isa decorative metal strip with threestuds in place. The other find is anunusual form of coffin designationthat consisted of the letters “G” and“W” separated by a stylized heart.The “G” “W” and heart were createdfrom fabric that was placed onthe coffin lid and formed by brassstuds nailed into the fabric. Theletters represent the name of thedeceased individual: George Weekes, Jr.8

The coffin hardware recovered at Farewell Cemetery issimilar to examples found at other contemporary sites and thecoffin hardware collection discovered at the hardware store ofA. L. Calhoun in Clio, South Carolina.9, 10 These similaritiessuggest that most coffin hardware would have come from a fewmanufacturers and distributors. Cost would most likely havebeen an important factor in deciding what items were to befixed to a coffin. Unfortunately the available catalogues do notlist prices, for it was most likely the distributors that set thecost for customers. Many of the decorations such as studs,were manufactured of inexpensive stamped tin. Handles weremade of various materials such as white metal, plated whitemetal and sometimes solid brass. The more elaborate coffinswith an abundance of hardware do not necessarily indicate anexpensive burial since most of the hardware represented atFarewell Cemetery was made of elaborately decorated whitemetal or stamped tin and could be compared to inexpensivecostume jewellery.

The Victorians were known for their complex behaviorsassociated with death and mourning. Coffin decoration wasjust one part of the elaborate rituals associated with death

practiced during the nineteenth century.Although not as visible or as well-known as

other aspects of death rituals like clothing,mourning behaviors and gravestonecarving and sculpture, coffin decorationwas one way mourners could personalizea coffin for a loved one. Today the coffinhardware from the Farewell Cemeteryexcavation resides at the Oshawa

Museum where it continues toassist researchers in understandinghow the Victorians decoratedcoffins and commemorated theirdead.

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Notes1. The funeral home business founded by the Luke brothers is still in

operation today under the name McIntosh Anderson Kellam (MAK).The Manchester of Canada: Oshawa Illustrated, The Ontarioreformer: Oshawa, Ontario, 1911, 32.

2. Catalogue H-6. Illustrating Coffin and Casket Hardware and FuneralSundries, Hearne Bros. & Co., Whitakers, N.C., u.S.A. DigitalCollections, east Carolina university, digital.lib.ecu.edu/22655.

3. Catalogue H-6. Illustrating Coffin and Casket Hardware and FuneralSundries, Hearne Bros. & Co., Whitakers, N.C., u.S.A. DigitalCollections, east Carolina university, digital.lib.ecu.edu/22655.Accessed July 23, 2018.

4. Grave Preservation by the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria, GravePreservation, Monuments, Obelisks, Columns, Pedestals.www.oldcem.bc.ca/gp_art_sy4.htm. Accessed July 23, 2018.

5. Laura Suchan, Memento Mori: Classifying Nineteenth Century OntarioGravestones, Oshawa, ON: Laura Suchan, 2012, 31.

6. “Archaeological Mitigation of the Farewell (Harmony road) PioneerCemetery,” City of Oshawa regional Municipality of Durham,Toronto, Ontario: Archaeological Services, 1993.

7. “Archaeological Mitigation of the Farewell (Harmony road) PioneerCemetery,” City of Oshawa regional Municipality of Durham,Toronto, Ontario: Archaeological Services, 1993.

8. “Archaeological Mitigation of the Farewell (Harmony road) PioneerCemetery,” City of Oshawa regional Municipality of Durham,Toronto, Ontario: Archaeological Services, 1993.

9. Philip J. Woodley, The Stirrup Court Cemetery Coffin Hardware.Ontario Archaeology 53: 45-64. 1992.

10. Debi Hacker-Norton and Michael Trinkley, “remember Man ThouArt Dust: Coffin Hardware of the early...” Chicora Foundationresearch Series Publications, accessed July 26, 2018.Chicora.org/pdfs/rS2-rememberMan.pdf&p=Devex.LB.1,5068.1. Anin-depth analysis of a large cache of hardware found at the A. L.Calhoun merchandise store in Calhoun, N. C. and the Sumter CasketCompany, Sumter, S. C., was presented in this 1984 study.

Melissa Cole was born and raised in Oshawa and has worked at theOshawa Museum for 18 years. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours)degree in Anthropology from Trent university and a MuseumManagement and Curatorship certificate from Sir Sandford FlemingCollege. Melissa cares for the extensive collection at the Oshawa Museumand is also responsible for the design, construction, fabrication,installation and maintenance of exhibits. She is passionate about herhometown heritage and challenging the traditional story and history ofOshawa.

Laura Suchan is the executive Director of the Oshawa Museum, amuseum dedicated to the preservation of Oshawa’s history. Laura’spassion for public history has led to presentations at provincial, nationaland international conferences including the Ontario Museum Association,History of education Society, and the Association for Gravestone Studies.In 2005, Laura developed a classification system for nineteenth centuryOntario gravestones which allowed for a more systematic transcriptionand preservation of gravestones. She currently contributes her time tothe unregistered Cemeteries Committee (Ontario Historical Society), theTrent university Alumni Association and the Women’s HerstoryConnection of Durham region.

“No. 2, White,” decorative metal handle, as seen in a catalogpublished by Hearne Bros., & Co., Whitakers, North Carolina,

c. 1890. Courtesy East Carolina University.

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Elbridge H. Thompson (1839-1931).

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Funny EpitaphsA CENTURY-OLD LOOK AT SOME pOIGNANT AND AMUSING CARVINGS

Elbridge H. Thompson (1839-1931) Lebanon, New Hampshire

I propose to wander with you among the cemeteries of our landand trace the idiosyncrasies of the world as they crop out [sic] ontombstones. Someone has said the deaths of the world are onlyprovision for the births of the world and there would be no roomfor to-day if yesterday did not get out of the way. This is true andif death must come, there must be graveyards. Even theadvocates of cremation demand a finely laid our cemetery withits slabs and monuments on which to record the names, age and,sometimes, the peculiarities of those who have gone before.

The cemetery is an educator of the living where one may getwisdom and rare instruction from the monuments and graveswhich so outnumber the abodes of the living. Some of what isinscribed there is the subject of this essay and I testify to theauthenticity of what you are about to read. Fictitious inscriptionslack the charm of authenticity which in the case of epitaphs aremore remarkable than any imagination could conjure. Almostany witty writer can produce very funny epitaphs, hence the

papers and magazines always intent on novelty often publishmost quaint and grotesque epitaphs but many of them are ofsuch absurd character that I came to the conclusion they must befiction. I was induced to give the matter careful study to ascertainif any portion of them were real. To that end, I have visited manyout-of-the-way graveyards. The result was indeed startling: thatpeople of any intelligence could allow the sculptor to work forhours, days or even weeks with the stone and chisel to inscribesuch odd, gossipy or downright inappropriate words tocommemorate the death of a friend or relative is astounding, aswith this example from the Hollis Cemetery here in NewHampshire:

Here lies old Caleb Ham, By trade a Bum;When he died, the Devil cried,“Come Caleb, Come”

Starting close to home, I commenced my odyssey in the oldpine Hill Cemetery on the ridge near the residence of Miss Fanny

Editor’s note:When my grandmother, Beatrice Davis Ashworth, died in 1978, she left in my care along, typewritten manuscript for a lecture her old Uncle Elbridge gave in his home townof Lebanon, New Hampshire (and perhaps elsewhere). Until contemplating this issue ofNineteenth Century on the subject of death, I never quite knew what to do with hisremarkable piece of field research. I have resurrected it here, with some judiciousediting for readability. Wherever possible, I have corroborated his observationsthrough the remarkable website www.findagrave.com. But, even when the gravesnoted herein have been found there, more than a century after Uncle Elbridge’sobservations they are often unreadable due to the weathering.Since I was able to find enough evidence that these epitaphs are not invented, I have

confidence that Uncle Elbridge was an accurate researcher. The date of this researchand of the delivery of his lecture is not known. Based on some reasonable conjecturenoted later, I expect this was gathered and written between 1900 and 1910.It is fair to ask why a peer-reviewed scholarly publication such as Nineteenth

Century would publish an article written more than a century ago. The currentcondition of the epitaph for Mary Pemberton, in Vergennes, Vermont provides ananswer to the question. In Elbridge Thompson’s day, the grave and its poignantmessage was legible. Today it is nearly indecipherable. Thus, the first publicationanywhere of this research affords us a record of graves that may be illegible orcompletely lost today.As a last note, we at Nineteenth Century should be quite glad of any corroboration

readers might wish to furnish. These graves are all in New England (or New York). Ifan opportunity arises to visit one or more of these graveyards, please let us know if youlocate the grave that is written about here.

Warren Ashworth

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Alden in Lebanon. Finding nothing particularly queer, I didcome away with this poignant inscription:

In memory of Mr. John Baldwin who diedDecember 7th, 1817, in his 75th year.

And then is added:Mr. Baldwin had 13 of his family die in 6 years

A tragic bit of family history that still resounds so many yearslater.

More intriguing are two tombstones I found in Hollis, NewHampshire, three if you include the above ode to Caleb Ham.Here is the epitaph of a man who evidently was not a generalfavorite in the town, yet two stood by him to the last:

Here the old man liesNo one laughs and no one cries;Where he’s gone or how he faresNo one knows and no one caresBut his brother James And his wife EmalineThey were his friends all the time.

And I encountered this:Here lies Cynthia, Steven’s wife,She lived six years in calm and strife;Death came at last and set her free;I was glad and so was she.

In Guilford, New Hampshire, may be seen two graves; onethat of Josiah Haines and the other of his wife; and althoughgiven to good works, they evidently were not fond of ministers.Mr. Haines’ stone is thus inscribed:

He was a blessing to the Saints To Sinners rich and poor;He was a kind and worthy manHe’s gone to be no more.He kept the faith unto the end,And left the world in Peace, He did not for a doctor sendNor for a hireling priest.

On Mrs. Haines’ stone we find the following:Here beneath these marble stonesSleeps the dust and rests the bonesOf one who led a Christian Life‘Twas Haineses, Johsiah’s Wife.She was a woman full of TruthAnd feared her God from early youth;And priests and elders did her fightBecause she brought their deed to light.

Quite a bit of family history in two grave stones. And inbitterness towards the clergy the Haines’ were not alone. InMilford, New Hampshire, one Doctor Cutter became very muchdisgusted with his church because of an unpleasantness which

occurred between the church and his wife. He apparently hopedto get even with them by placing the following long, scathing andvery expensive epitaph on her grave stone:

Caroline H., Wife of Calvin Cutter, M.D.Murdered by the Baptist Ministry and BaptistChurches As follows: Sep’t. 28, 1838; aged 33She was accused of lying in church meeting by theRev. D. D. Pratt and Deacon Albert Adams Was condemned by the church unheard.She was reduced to povertyby Deacon William WallaceWhen an exparte council was asked of the MilfordBaptist Church, by the advice of their committee,George Raymond, Calvin Averill, and Andrew HutchinsonThey voted not to receive any communication onthe subject. The Rev. Mark Carpenter said hethought as the good old Deacon said,“We’ve got Cutter down and it’s best tokeep him down.” The intentional and maliciousdestruction of her character And happiness asabove described destroyed her life. Her last wordsupon the subject were “Tell the Truth and TheIniquity will come out”

On a lighter note, in Hebron, New Hampshire, we find thiscareless pronunciation set for eternity on a good man’s stone:

He was a pillow in the church

In Seabrook, New Hampshire, Cemetery you may seek outthis poor rhyme and worse grammar, written in the crude,colloquial style of the early times:

Is she dead, am she gone, Is I left here all alone?Cruel Fate, how unkindTo take she and leave me behind.

And another from that same graveyard:He was almost a success.

So much for my explorations in New Hampshire. Staid oldVermont is not far behind in eccentricities. How is this for subtlesarcasm from Burlington’s Old Cemetery?

My wife lies here;All my tears cannot bring her backTherefore, I weep.

And another commentary on marriage from the samecemetery:

She lived with her husband for fifty yearsAnd died in the confident hope of a better life.

Praises on a tombstone are trifles vainly spent,A good man’s name is his best monument.

From a tombstone in Knaresborough, England.1

Y

Y

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While this last may have been of honest intention, it leavesone wondering. In Chelsea, Vermont, at the West Hills Cemetery,I found this which I would not have countenanced had I not seenit with mine own eyes:

Here lies the body of Hannah ThurberOnce she talked and none could curb her;Three husbands had she, all are dead:They died of earache so ‘tis said.

A counterpoint is found in the same graveyard:In memory of Susan Glover.My wife most kind and true:Though I should marry ten times overHer like I shall not find.

Many are the graves of children, of course. Always sad, aparticular few in Vermont bear notation. Up in Burlington youmay see inscribed in imperishable marble this silly doggerel:

Beneath this stone our baby lays,He neither cries nor hollers.He lived just one and twenty days,And cost us forty dollars.

I found this:Our little Jacob has been taken awayTo Bloom in a superior flower pot above.

And on another little grave is inscribed:This little buttercup was bound to jointhe Heavenly choir.

In Stratford:Ezra T. Jackson, died Sep’t. 14, 1763, aged 25 days.What did the little hasty sojourner find soforbidding And disgustful in our upper world tooccasion his Precipitous exit?

In plainfield, Vermont an older child is remembered:This blooming youth with health most fairTo his uncle’s mill pond did repair.Undressed himself and then plunged inBut never did come out again.

Enough I think of those who died too young. Let us to [sic]Vergennes, Vermont to read an epitaph sent to me by a friend:

Elizabeth Pemberton died January 31st, 1836,aged 46

And then follows this legend:An aged woman sleeps beneath this sod2 Who once the path of affluence trod;But fate decreed to make her poorWhen scarce a friend did ope her door;

Her heart it broke, her senses fled.And now she is numbered with the Dead.

From the same churchyard, terse and to the point:A rum cough carried him off.

And here is one which, if not a lapsus linguae, we might call alapse of the graver’s chisel. It reads:

Sacred to the memory of three twins.

But for brevity, honesty and economy of words, one inGrafton, Vermont, carries off the palm:

Gone Home Below.

My peregrinations next took me to Massachusetts where Ithink you will conclude that tombstone trash is not all confinedto New Hampshire and Vermont. Indeed, in the old GraineryBurying Ground in Boston, on Tremont Street, by the side ofHistoric park Street Church, you may read on a stone:

Here I lie bereft of breath’Because a cough carried me off;Then a coffin they carried me off in.

In Copp’s Hill Cemetery near the Old North Church in Bostonyou may seek out the stone that reads:

The sister of Sarah Lucas Lieth hereWhom I did Love most dear;But now her Soul has took its flightAnd bade her spiteful folks good night.

In the Old plymouth Churchyard there is a stone on which thesculptor was most likely instructed to place the following: “OLord, she was thine”. By miscalculation he did not have room forthe last letter and placed the ‘e’ on another line, leaving it to read:

O Lord, she was thin

A little further on is the stone to Tabitha plasket, 1807, thisepitaph most likely written by herself, breathes such a spirit ofdefiance that it attracts much attention:

Adieu, vain world, I’ve seen enough of thee,And I am careless what thou sayest of me;Thy smiles I wish not, nor thy frowns I fear,I’m now at rest, my head lies quiet here.

Mrs. plasket in her widowhood (so plymouth history tells us)taught a private school for small children at the same time shedid her spinning. Her mode of punishment was to pass skeins ofyarn under the arms of the little culprits and hang them uponpegs on the walls. Apparently, a suspended row of miscreantswas a ludicrous sight.

O Lord, she was thin.

From a tombstone in the Old plymouth Churchyard, BostonY

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In South Dennis on Cape Cod the awful power of the seainspired this rhyme:

Of seven sons the Lord his Father gaveHe was the fourth who found a watery grave;Fifteen days had passed since thecircumstance occurredWhen his body was found and decently interred.

And just offshore, in Vinyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard, asfollows:

John and Lydia, the blooming pair,A whale killed him, and her body lies here.

In Chatham I encountered this, written almost in cipher:There were three brothers went to seaWho were never known to wrangle; Holm’s Hole,cedar pole, Crinkle, Crinkle, Crangle.

The explanation of this mystic epitaph in local lore is: threebrothers started for Holm’s Hole in a boat to get to cedar polesand on the passage they were killed by lightning, the sound oftheir demise uniquely represented by the crinkle, crinkle,crangle.

And here is a pointer for politicians: In Wayland I found:Here lies the body of Dr. HaywardA man who never votedOf such is the kingdom of heaven

In East Wareham the historical society records the storybehind the next grave stone. An old bachelor, an Irishman, diedowing many small debts. It was his creditors who erected a stoneover his grave on which they had placed the following:

Hibernia’s son himself exiled,Without an inmate, wife, or child, He lived alone.And when he died, his purse though small, Contained enough to pay us all, And buy this stone.

In that same graveyard, I found a stone that seems to havebeen more recently inscribed than the date of death wouldindicate. Grave markers from the seventeenth century are veryrare in my perambulations, at least ones that are as legible asthis. Based on its style and its message it would appear to be areplacement stone with a very important message. Only abouttwo hundred years ago there was a tremendous blot on thecivilization of this country when the witch craft craze got such astrong hold on the people of New England. Any development ofmental trouble was looked upon as a sure sign of sorcery. And ifthe poor person who became deranged was a woman, she wasoften doomed to be hanged, drowned or worse. The pages of ourearly history are forever blotted with the records of manyexecutions which grew out of the ignorance of our early citizens.

Accused of witch craft she declared I am innocent andGod will declare my innocency Once acquitted. Yetfalsely condemned She suffered death July 19th, 1692.Christian martyr who for truth could die, When allabout thee owned the hideous lie,The world redeemed from superstitious swayIs breathing freer for thy sake to-day.

And this is true, for with modern intelligence and modernreligious ideas such a crime as hanging a poor maniac for a witchcan, we trust, never again take place.

Editor’s note: We do not have a specific date when Mr.Thompson composed this lecture. The line above “Only abouttwo hundred years ago...” is the closest we come to being able toattribute a date to it. Two hundred years from execution of thiswoman would be 1892. It was in 1692 that the tragic masshysteria swept so much of Massachusetts. It peaked in 1693with the last of the Salem witch trials. If the date of this writingwas well after 1910 one might imagine that an author of such apiece, reading aloud, would most likely say “Only about twohundred and twenty years ago...” or “Only about two hundredand thirty years ago... .” Thus between 1900 and 1910 might bea likely date. From another point of view, we know thatElbridge H. Thompson lived from 1839 to 1931. From the townregister we know he ran a millinery shop in Lebanon, NewHampshire starting in at least 1900. The records also show thathe continued to work in that shop until his death. From theamount of footwork required to document this lecture, we mightnaturally assume that, successful with the shop in his lateryears, he could perhaps afford the time to pursue this research.And though he died at age 91, we would assume he also neededthe energy of a man in his sixties or seventies to go into the fieldwith such zeal. But, this is conjecture. Of proof, we have only onespecific, which is the epigram at the beginning is from a bookpublished in England in 1900. Thus, this manuscript had tohave been written after that and before 1931.

The state of Maine is particularly rich in grave stone oddities,but no inscription of them all can show more business enterprisethan this one which displays to advantage the bitterness of localwarfare over the medicinal qualities of two noted mineralsprings:

Here lies John Jones and his two daughters Who died of drinking Cheltingham waters.If they had drunk the waters of Howe,They might have all been living now.

I do not imagine that the state of marriage in Maine is anydifferent than elsewhere but the state certainly abounds withcemetery commentary on the subject. In Augusta, I found this:

He was almost a success.

From a tombstone in Seabrook, New HampshireY

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I laid my wife beneath this stone;For her repose and mine own.

In Winslow this:Here lies the body of Obadiah Wilkinson andRuth, his wife.Their warfare is accomplished.In the same bone yard can be found:Here lies my poor wife much lamentedShe is Happy and I’m contented.

And, also in Winslow, this more peaceful paean:She was married 44 yearsAnd in all that timeShe never banged a door.

The Old First parish Cemetery of Alfred is fruitful inantique curiosities of epitaphy of which this legend is a fairexample:

John Hall, 1762-1813May he rest in peace till we meet again.-His loving wife

In York Cemetery is a marital admonition:Emma, Daughter of Abraham and Matilda Cox,and Wife of Theodore Shallen,Died July 9, 1847, aged 26 yearsLeaving five children; married too young againstHer father’s will.Single women, take warning.

And an appeal found in Kittery point Cemetery:Here lies Martin ElginbrodHave mercy on my soul, Lord GodAs I would do were I Lord GodAnd you were Martin Elginbrod.

And so ends my tour. Going forward, let us guard withjealous care the graves of our loved ones, and see that notrifling or senseless epitaph shall mar the resting place of anyfriend of ours. It does seem that many modern cemeteries inour larger cities now have a censorship committee to whommust be submitted all inscriptions, and the directors reservethe right to reject any which seems undesirable.

Let us congratulate ourselves that there is a grandmovement at the present time in the direction of improvingour cemeteries. Look at the various national burying grounds:Arlington, Gettysburg, and others where all that can be doneto beautify and adorn the last resting place of thousands ofAmerica’s noble youth who fell in the service of their countryhas been done by a grateful nation. This gracious [part of a]poem by Theodore O’Hara on Arlington’s McClellan Gate setsthe tone for more art and less wit in poetry for the deceased:

The muffled drum’s sad roll has beatThe soldier’s last tattoo;No more on Life’s parade shall meetThat brave and fallen few.On Fame’s eternal camping-groundTheir silent tents to spread,And Glory guards, with solemn roundThe bivouac of the dead.

Look at Woodlawn, Forest Hills, Greenwood and MountAuburn where nature, supplemented by art, has adorned theresting place of so many of earth’s loved ones with a lavishhand.

And may we not believe that the time is coming when“God’s acre” will be the fairest spot on earth? When mould[sic] and melancholy will give way to the comforting anduplifting symbols of memory and triumphant faith, when wecan look away from the darkness of the open grave to the gloryof the open heavens. And when the voiceless marble of ourcemeteries shall respond to the voices of the beloved dead,calling us to meet them in the “city which hath foundations,whose builder and maker is God.”3

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Notes1. A Picturesque History of Yorkshire, J. S. Fletcher. London: J. M. Dent

& Co., 1900. p. 2252. This is one of the grave stones that may be found on

www.findagrave.com. It is of interest that elbridge Thompson’sfriend made a transcription error in the first line, corrected here. Themanuscript notation was “An aged woman sleeps beneath this slab.”The last word of this line in the transcription onwww.findagrave.com is ‘sod,’ true to the rhyming couplet, as ‘slab’ isnot.

3. Hebrews 11:10 AV

She lived with her husband for fifty yearsAnd died in the confident hope of a better life.

From a tombstone in Burlington, Vermont

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Elbridge H. Thompson was born in 1839 and died in 1931. He lived his lifein Lebanon, New Hampshire, where he was a milliner and owned amillinery shop.

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The making of a death mask, c. 1900. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

When nineteenth century celebrities lay dying, sculptorsstarted preparing liquid plaster to slather onto the features ofthe deceased. While the molds for making death masks weresculpted directly from the corpses’ faces, reporters updatedreaders on the progress of the work and critiqued the realismof the results. The plaster countenances came in varied shadesof whiteness, reminiscent of flesh already drained of blood.They soon went on public view as memorial tributes. Theywere considered three-dimensional records of “the momentafter the soul has taken flight,” as one newspaper reported in1884.1

A surprising number of Victorians kept death masks ondisplay, sometimes acquiring examples by the dozens.Quantities have remained on exhibit at institutions, wherethey are undergoing further research, shedding light on thelives of the deceased and the objects’ sometimes obsessed past-owners.

There is an enduring public fascination with these intimateimages-in-the-round of accomplished or notoriouspersonages, at peace right after exhaling their last breaths. Thesight still routinely stops viewers in their tracks, and it canbring on moments of respectful quiet, with thoughts of one’sown mortality. Knowing that the sculptors worked from actualhuman contours, withoutheroically idealizing or editing outany asymmetries and warts, is akey aspect of the objects’attraction.

“There are hairs still stuck inthe plaster,” I was told by MargiHofer, the museum director at theNew-York Historical Society, whilewe pondered William TecumsehSherman’s death mask at thefourth-floor gallery there this pastsummer. In 1891, the sculptorDaniel Chester French wasbrought to Sherman’s deathbed, tocreate plaster molds of the warhero’s head. On the plaster bustnow at the historical society, theface is bisected by a faintly visiblestraight line. That is likely aghostly trace of where French’steam had used a string or tool toslice apart the two halves of themold, while removing them fromthe corpse. The bust’s mattedtexture on Sherman’s beard mayhave resulted partly from the oilycoating used on the corpse’s skin,

so that stripping off the hardening plaster would cause nodisfiguring damage. The historical society has installed atouchscreen nearby, which allows visitors to spin the Shermanportrait virtually, revealing mussed thinning hair and a partialcomb-over on the back of the skull.

A few other death masks have gone on view in the samecase, including a portrait of the Seminole rebel Osceola (1804-1838), who died of quinsy, a throat infection, while imprisonedat Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina. Hisposthumous depiction looks calm and youthful, the foreheadunfurrowed. The cast was made around the time that an armydoctor decapitated the corpse and embalmed the head (itscurrent whereabouts are unknown). The historical society hasalso shown two versions of a cast made from the head of AaronBurr (1756-1836). It depicts him with his eyes sunken, his nosebent to his right, and his mouth crumpled—his false teethapparently taken out during his last days.

While Burr was suffering the aftermaths of a paralyzingstroke and shuffling off this mortal coil at a Staten Island hotel,a “mysterious stranger” had kept haunting the property. Assoon as Burr died (according to a 1920s account from thehistorian, art collector and physician John E. Stillwell), thelurking stranger appeared at the door bearing a kit full of

supplies to cast the corpse’s headand features “before the symptomsof decay made themselves visible.”2

Journalists and historiansroutinely recorded when sculptorsarrived at particular deathbeds,and even which bodies already incoffins had been hoisted intoseated positions to undergo thecasting process. The observersthen passed judgment on the deathmasks that had scarcely hardened.In 1882, Augustus Saint-Gaudensworked on a cast of presidentJames A. Garfield’s face, and theBuffalo Morning Express praisedhis rendition for representing therecent assassin victim’s features“exactly as they were after death,showing traces of suffering.”3 In1891, the New York Sunannounced that Sherman’s castwas deemed “satisfactory andperfectly successful in everyrespect,” preserving his features“as last seen by his family andfriends.”4

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Death MasksINTIMATE MEMORIAL TRIBUTES

Eve M. Kahn

Daniel Chester French, General William TecumsehSherman (1820-1891), 1891. New-York Historical Society.Gift of Mr. philemon Tecumseh Sherman.

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Cast makers were sometimes sent to deathbeds onassignment from phrenologists, including the New York-basedbrothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo NilesFowler (1811-1896). The practitioners of this pseudoscientificfield had widely popularized the theory that the shapes of facialfeatures and skulls revealed a person’s character strengths andweaknesses. Cranial bumps and slopes were said to indicatenow-obscure tendencies like “amativeness” (amorousness),“approbativeness” (eagerness to please) and “inhabitiveness”(attachment to home). The Fowlers eventually set up aphrenological publishing house, schools and museums. Theyworked in partnership with their sister Charlotte (1814-1901),her husband Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) and Lorenzo’swife Lydia (1823-1879). part of their substantial collection ofdeath masks has ended up at the New-York Historical Society.Burr’s cast-plaster portrait led the Fowlers and their followersto detect “excessive amativeness, destructiveness,combativeness, firmness and large self-esteem,” Dr. Stillwell

wrote. Sherman’s phrenological reports deemed him “kind,humane, domestic, and devotional” with tendencies to become“somewhat cranky and willful when opposed.”5 In examiningOsceola’s cast, phrenologists found signs of benevolence,amativeness, philoprogenitiveness (fertility) and, perhapsunderstandably since white settlers had stolen his territories,inhabitiveness.6

A few other Victorian collections of death masks haveremained whole. The University of Edinburgh owns thesubstantial former holdings of that city’s phrenological society

(details about the plaster heads’ identities and currentwhereabouts and exhibitions are posted atwww.phrenology.mvm.ed.ac.uk).7 University College Londonhas preserved three dozen casts that the British phrenologistRobert Noel started acquiring in the 1830s. He broughttogether death masks for important intellectuals, like the Irishphysician Robert James Graves (1796-1853), the discoverer ofthe thyroid malfunction known as Graves’ disease, as well ascastings of men and women who had been executed formurdering children. Eyebrow hairs occasionally remain stuckin Noel’s plaster portraits of the killers; the casts wereapparently made in haste at morgues.

The most prominent collection in America belonged toLaurence Hutton (1843-1904), a drama critic and literaryeditor, and it remains intact as his gift to princetonUniversity’s library.8 His book, Portraits in Plaster from theCollection of Laurence Hutton, delves into the sculptures’historical precedents. He explains that Egyptians made gold

face impressions to place on entombed mummies, and ancientRomans cast tinted wax masks from corpses’ faces and worethem in funeral processions. Hutton’s text waxes poetic attimes, pointing out that a mask

cannot flatter; it cannot caricature…And in the case ofthe death-mask particularly, it shows the subject often ashe permitted no one but himself to see himself. …In hismask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off!

L to R: Death mask of actor Laurence Barrett, 1891. produced at the direction of artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Death mask of writer and artistic salonhostess Celia Thaxter, 1894. Laurence Hutton Death Mask Collection, princeton University Library.

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part of Hutton’s collection had originally belonged to theBritish phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858), but Huttondisliked phrenology’s emphasis on clinical analysis and thedark side of humanity. “Usually, the phrenological Museumscontain casts of idiots, criminals, and monstrosities,” hecomplained. He focused instead on politicians (GeorgeWashington, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Disraeli), culturalluminaries (Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Coleridge,Wordsworth, Keats, Liszt) and megalomaniacs (Cromwell,Robespierre, Napoleon). He acquired death masks of artistswho had made death masks, including Canova and BenjaminRobert Haydon. Hutton owned new masks that had been castat the deathbeds of some of his friends, including the actorLawrence Barrett (that cast was produced at the direction ofAugustus Saint-Gaudens) and the entomologist HenryEdwards. Gazing upon those plaster visages, he wrote, madehim “grieve afresh for what I have lost.” A handful of womenhad accomplished enough to appear as faces on his shelves:Queen Louise of prussia, the actress Sarah Siddons, the writerand artistic salon hostess Celia Thaxter and the opera singerMaria Malibran (1808-1836). The latter had died months aftera devastating riding accident, and the mask reveals “her faceruined by that terrible fall from her horse,” he wrote. Heallowed a nameless head into the collection, too, depicting anAfrican-American boy from Florida. The architect ThomasHastings had made the cast from a living person. Hutton,reflecting the prevalent bigotry of his time, brutally describedthe youth as representing “one of the lowest examples of hisrace.” But he also showed a trace of compassion, wonderingwhether the boy’s “present inferiority” may have been at leastpartly due “to bad treatment and to unfavorablecircumstances.”

Hutton donated casts for display elsewhere, including theplayers Club in Manhattan, which he helped found in 1888with Edwin Booth. plaster faces of about a dozen luminariesare scattered around the building. Women are on hand—Malibran and the actress Ellen Terry—although the club’smembership was all male until the late 1980s. In one parlor,two drawers have been filled with masks. The curatorRaymond Wemmlinger told me that it is not clear whyparticular portraits were laid side by side in the displays overthe years. Goethe, Keats, the actor Edmund Kean and theplaywright Richard Brinsley Sheridan are together in a drawer,incongruously surrounding the bearded visage of Cromwell,who had tried to shut down all the theaters.

In summer 2018, while I was researching this article, deathmasks seemed to follow me everywhere. When I stopped by fora meeting at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library onthe History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute forAdvanced Study, a survey of their collection treasures was onview. A case was devoted to the wizened plaster face of theactivist and writer Charlotte perkins Gilman (1860-1935); shehad committed suicide while suffering from terminal breastcancer. The mark of the string or tool that had verticallybisected her posthumous cast remains visible.

At the Neue Galerie in New York, in a retrospective forGustav Klimt and Egon Schiele (1890-1918), a cast of Schiele’semaciated face was shown around the corner from a photo ofhis corpse at his deathbed in Vienna. He had succumbed to theSpanish flu pandemic, days after it had killed his wife Edithand their unborn child. The Neue Galerie installed his deathmask in a case over a gallery fireplace. His eyelashes,

eyebrows, forehead furrows and cheek sags are clearly molded.The peaceful white sculpture contrasted with his signaturecolorful paintings on the walls all around, depictingmalnourished lovers clutching each other. The mask drewsmall crowds; perhaps other viewers shared my eerie feelingthat I was witnessing the artist’s evanescence, in the midst ofhis family tragedy unfolding in wartime Vienna. In the galleryI ran into Jason Busch, the newly-appointed director of theAmerican Folk Art Museum in New York. He peered into thecase with somber wonder and asked, “How more real does itget?”

On a repeat visit to the New-York Historical Society, I stoodbefore the fourth-floor case full of assorted plaster faces forhalf an hour or so. I wanted to ask museum goers pausingthere about their thoughts on a rather ghoulish subject thathad nonetheless captivated me. A middle-aged British touristpithily summed up their modern-day broad appeal: “They’repretty creepy,” he said, “but they’re really cool at the sametime.”

eve M. Kahn, independent scholar, wrote the weekly Antiques columnfor The New York Times from 2008 to 2016. She has contributed widely topublications and websites including The Magazine Antiques, Apollomagazine, and atlasobscura.com. In recent years she has specialized indocumenting the lives and works of under-appreciated women pioneers,including the photographer Lillian Baynes Griffin (1871-1916), the painterAnnie Traquair Lang (1885-1918), and the artist and designer edith VarianCockcroft (1881-1962). Kahn’s first book, Forever Seeing New Beauties:The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907, is duesoon from Wesleyan university Press.

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Notes1. “The Clown’s Death,” The Tennessean, June 15, 1884, 10.2. John e. Stillwell, The history of the Burr portraits, their origin, their

dispersal and their reassemblage (New York, N.Y.: privatelypublished, 1928), 36.

3. “New-York City,” The Buffalo Morning Express, February 28, 1882, 1.4. “Sherman Lying in State,” New York Sun, February 19, 1891, 2.5. “Our Leading Generals,” American Phrenological Journal and Life

Illustrated, August 1865, 34.6. Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine

Arts in America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: university of North Carolina Press,1997), 277.

7. Details about the university of edinburgh plaster heads’ identitiesand current whereabouts and exhibitions are posted atwww.phrenology.mvm.ed.ac.uk.

8. Princeton’s online database for the Hutton Holdings islibrary.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/

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Charles Willson peale (1741-1827), Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child, Rachel Weeping, 1772. philadelphia Museum of Art

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Remembering the Life in DeathTHE ROLE OF pORTRAITURE AND pHOTOGRApHYIN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AS A MOURNING RITUAL

Marie Carter

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in nineteenth-century mourning rituals that might be considered macabretoday. For example, two years ago the American Folk ArtMuseum in New York City held an exhibition titled Securingthe Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America. There arealso several recent books covering this subject. Museums likeThe Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn and The MütterMuseum of the College of physicians of philadelphia, andcemeteries such as The Green-Wood Cemetery, are alsocovering these lost rituals. For example, this year, The MütterMuseum hosted an exhibition on hair art, most of whichcovered that particular Victorian mourning ritual.

In the Victorian era, it was popular to paint portraits of, orhave photographs taken, with the dead. Today, these portraitsmight be deemed as creepy or bizarre, but during its time ofpopularity, posthumous portraiture or capturing the dead oncamera, was accepted as a method of honoring andimmortalizing the dead and coping with bereavement.

Posthumous PortraitureBefore the era of photography the desire to have a lastingmemento of one’s loved one often led to the creation of aposthumous portrait. However, this had a set of uniquechallenges.

Generally death was followed by a two to three day waitingperiod to ensure the loved one was truly dead. Victorians areoften noted for their terror of premature burial. Suchincidences were more common than one might think. Forexample, The Victorian Book of the Dead cites multipleinstances of corpses sitting up during a wake and quotesevidence of premature burials from the newspapers of the day.Science had not advanced enough to differentiate between acoma and death.

The waiting period would give the grieving family anopportunity to locate an artist, and give that artist a window oftime to create the perfect portrait of the beloved for the family.Since death has a habit of striking at inopportune times, thefamily would need to secure an artist quickly. The corpsemight be disfigured or marked by disease, in a state ofdecomposition or lying supine in a coffin. Some artistsagonized over posthumous portraits. With the time factorinvolved there was no room for mistakes; given that theportrait had to be created for a grieving family who would havewanted a perfect depiction of their loved one. There was noarranging the subject to the artist’s liking, a subject that mightbe discolored, withered, swollen, deflated, bloated, ormangled. The aim of the posthumous portrait was to representsomeone who was dead, as alive. Due to these challenges, the

artist would often charge twice the amount of what they wouldtypically charge.1

popular American artists of the posthumous portrait in thenineteenth century included William Matthew prior (1806-1873), Joseph Whiting Stock (1815-1855), Joseph GoodhueChandler (1813-1884), and Isaac Wetherby (1819-1904).

Some of these portraits could feature the loved onemourning over the body of the recently deceased, for example,a portrait titled Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child,Rachel Weeping by Charles Willson peale from 1772 depicts awoman in dark mourning clothes weeping into a large whitehandkerchief over the body of an infant, dressed in white.

posthumous portraits are also embedded with subtle andcurious imagery: from cats and dogs who were consideredguardians for the “other world,” children’s toys, hammer andnails (suggested as possible symbols of Christ2), birds, andflowers. In some of the portraits, children are only wearing

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Portrait of Jedidiah Williamson, c.1837. Courtesy the Long Island Museum. This posthumous portrait wascommissioned by the Williamson family after the young boy was struckby a wagon.

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one shoe, a possible nod to the Christ child, as Jesus isdepicted without a shoe in some medieval portraits. Children,or even adults, who died of cholera were often depicted as theywere at the time of death with a blue-gray hue to their skin, forexample the Memorial Portrait of Catherine Schultz in theMetropolitan Museum of Art, circa 1836, artist unidentified,depicts the skin of the deceased with a leaden tone. This skintone was often due to the effects of cholera, which couldsignificantly change the appearance of a person within amatter of hours. posthumous portraits were frequently ofchildren due to the high infant mortality rate in the nineteenthcentury. Often, the subjects are wearing their Sunday best,with hair immaculately styled, coiffed, and curled. Thistradition of depicting the dead looking their best wouldcontinue with the rise of postmortem photography.

Postmortem PhotographyThe earliest known surviving photograph made in a camera,was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826 inFrance. In the United States, further developments inphotography were made by Samuel F. B. Morse and WinslowHomer. Samuel Morse, who was a well-known portrait painterof his day, was an early adopter of Louis Daguerre’sphotographic method.3 Morse was interested in thisimmortalizing technique because he was devastated by thedeath of his beloved wife Lucreita in 1825. He loved the ideaof having a memento that could quickly capture a deceasedloved one. Because photographs could be created morerapidly than a painted portrait, photography soon became themore popular way of depicting the deceased.

Moreover, in the early stages of photography, even theslightest hint of movement from the subject having theirphotograph taken, could result in a blurred photograph, henceall the portraits of frozen, grim faces from that era. By takinga photograph of the unmoving dead, it would ensure a perfectportrait by which to remember the loved one.

In 1839 the daguerreotype process was introduced into theUnited States. Within a year, that process was being used tocapture recently deceased loved ones. In 1853 John F.Mascher invented a stereoscopic device that created a three-dimensional image out of side-by-side daguerreotypes.

Advances in photography, and the rise in “Spiritphotography” in particular, coincide with the rising deathsduring the Civil War. According to the American BattlefieldTrust, approximately 620,000 soldiers died during the CivilWar.4 As a result, a high percentage of the U. S. populationwas in mourning and seeking ways to commemorate thedead.5

Certainly one of the most striking aspects of postmortemphotography is the number of photographs of dead infants.One of the most famous is that of Samuel Charles Stowe, theson of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was her sixth child, and hedied in a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati at eighteen months.The photograph, taken in 1849 (artist unidentified) is part ofthe collection at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,Harvard University. In this portrait, the infant lies on a bed,head resting on a pillow, simple white flowers (perhapssnowdrops) in his left hand. His eyes are closed, as thoughpeacefully sleeping, and he is wearing a white gown. Harriet

Top to bottom: William Matthew prior (1806-1873), Baby in Blue, c.1845. National Gallery of Art; Artist unknown, Memorial Portrait ofCatherine Schultz (1789-1832). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Beecher Stowe, of course, is the author of the wildly popular,Uncle Tom’s Cabin. published three years later, the novel hadprofound effects on attitudes towards slavery in the UnitedStates, and was the second best-selling book of the nineteenthcentury after the Bible.6 In the context of the photography ofher son, one scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin is particularlystriking. Uncle Tom (a black slave) rescues a young girl(perhaps five or six years old) from drowning. Her name isEva, and she persuades her father to buy Uncle Tom.Eventually Eva falls terminally ill, and before she passes away,she gives a lock of her hair to each of the slaves, telling themthey must become Christians so they can all be reunited in

Heaven. perhaps Stowe was considering the death of herinfant son when she wrote about the deathbed of Little Eva.

In addition to the portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son,the recent exhibition at the American Folk Art Museumfeatured other photographs and daguerreotypes byunidentified artists from the collection of the Burns Family(Stanley B. Burns and Elizabeth A. Burns). A hand-tinteddaguerreotype titled A Posthumous Mourning Portrait: LittleDrummer Girl, Sarah A. Lawrence of 119 Hudson Avenue,reveals an infant, perhaps eighteen months old, lying on a bedwith blue sheets. Her eyes are open. She is wearing a faded-redpatterned dress, and a drum is slung over her shoulders.

Remember Me

Remember me when I am gone away,Gone far away into the silent land;When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by dayYou tell me of our future that you plann’d:Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet if you should forget me for a whileAnd afterwards remember, do not grieve:For if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smileThan that you should remember and be sad.

-Christina Rossetti, 1849

L to R: post-mortem photograph of Samuel Charles Stowe, 1849. post-mortem tintype of an unidentifed child, c. 1860. photograph of unidentifedwoman and deceased infant, c. 1855.

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Infants were often depicted with toys. In anotherdaguerreotype from 1848, titled Father and Daughter withToy Rattle, (artist unidentified) abearded adult man standing in ablack suit, props up his infant in ablue, perhaps, solid-colored dress.The infant, whose eyes are open, isholding a rattle.

From the same collection isanother daguerreotype, SistersHolding Photograph of DeceasedLoved One, circa 1846, two gloomylooking sisters stand side-by-side,one staring into the distance, onestaring directly at the camera,holding a portrait of their lovedone taken while alive. The portraitis so tiny it’s hard to discern whothe figure might be. In anothertinted daguerreotype from 1860titled Mother in a Country DressCradling Her Infant, a mother in acollared housedress, hair pinnedback in a bun, holds her infant inher arms. The infant’s eyes areclosed, and the infant is wearing anall-white dress.

Curiously, in the photographMother and Daughter with EyesPainted Open circa 1875, aninfant, who is cradled in hermother’s arms, has her eyes

painted open. The mother wears a black mourning dress. Theinfant wears a white dress, embroidered with flowers, and her

hair is curled.Often, the subjects are depicted

holding flowers or a single rose as withthe daguerreotype, Young Woman withRose, circa 1844. Here, a young lady allin black lies with her eyes closed,holding a simple white rose in her lefthand.

With either painted orphotographed posthumous portraits, itwas important to get it right. While theloved one was assumed to have movedon to higher realms, the ones leftbehind only had this memento as apermanent reminder of the life that hadonce been. photographer MathewBrady stated in 1856, “you cannot tellhow soon it might be too late.”7 In thiscontext, he had placed anadvertisement in The New York DailyTribune urging readers to sit for theirportrait while they still could.

Spirit PhotographyWith the unprecedented loss of lifeduring the Civil War the overwhelminggrief that swept the country causedmany to seek a connection with thedead. This coincided with the rise ofSpiritualism, a movement based on the

post-mortem daguerreotype of a deceased infant, c. 1840.

Spirit photograph of Abraham Lincoln with Mary ToddLincoln, William H. Mumler, c. 1869. Mumler’s photoswere later exposed as fraudulent.

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belief that the spirits of the dead exist. Spiritualists believedthat the dead had the ability and motivation to communicatewith the living. Its popularity commenced, in this country,around 1848, when Kate and Margaret Fox, two youngteenagers in Hydesville, New York, claimed they were incommunication with a peddler who had been murdered andburied in their basement. The sisters asserted that this personcommunicated with them through a series of “rappings.” Thesisters went on to become celebrities and performed séancesthroughout the United States.

William H. Mumler was a pioneer in what came to beknown as Spirit photography in the 1860s, and he was directlyinfluenced by the Spiritualists of the day. He had an office at630 Broadway in New York City. An engraver by trade, helearned the art of photography on weekends, and was merelydabbling in photography when he took his first “Spiritphotograph” in 1862. He subsequently became interested inthe work of Mrs. Hannah Green Stuart, proprietress of aphotographic studio and art gallery. As Mumler dabbled inphotography, Stuart dabbled in mediumship. She claimed tobe in communication with the dead, and also claimed shecould diagnose illnesses. Mumler said he had seen men faintunder her charismatic powers.

Mumler discovered his spirit photography technique byaccident after he saw a second figure in a photograph he tookof himself. He recognized the other woman who appeared inthe portrait as his cousin who had passed away twelve yearsprior. The explanation for this was that the image was a doubleexposure from an old emulsion plate. On discussion withStuart, he decided to pursue this new discovery. He told hisstory to Dr. Gardner who then reported the matter to anewspaper called the Herald of Progress,8 leaving out thelogical explanation. A week later the newspaper published anaccount of the image’s appearance. This caused quite asensation in the Spiritualist community.

Seeing there was a market for it, Mumler started workingas a medium, taking people’s pictures and doctoring thenegatives to add lost loved ones into them (mostly using otherphotographs as basis). Some of his famous photographsinclude the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison with ashackled spirit; the medium Fannie Conant with a Spirit imageof her brother; a curious Spirit image of a child beside aphotograph of a (presumed) family member; and most famousof all, Mary Todd Lincoln posing in a seated position with the

Spirit image of her husband standing behind her, ghostlywhite hands placed firmly on her shoulders. Some of theimages are rather comforting, for example, one depicts Mrs.H. B. Sawyer being embraced by a spirit she claimed to be herlate husband who himself was holding a spirit that she thoughtwas the infant child she lost.

Mumler’s fraud was discovered after he put identifiableliving Boston residents in the photos as spirits. He was put ontrial in New York City in 1869, and even p. T. Barnum testifiedagainst him (Barnum had been photographed by Mumler withthe spirit of Abraham Lincoln beside him). Though Mumlerwas acquitted at the trial, his reputation was ruined and hedied in poverty in 1884. It has been decided by photographyexperts that all of Mumler’s photographs are fraudulent. Noone is quite sure of which technique he used, but there are anumber of theories among experienced photographers.

Other photographers also went into the Spirit photographyracket. One was Fred A. Hudson, who took many Spiritphotographs for Spiritualists in 1872. Through the 1880s intothe early twentieth century Spirit photography remainedpopular and Spiritualism had many notable proponents suchas the celebrated writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and thescientist Sir William Crookes. However, as more frauds wereexposed, the practice of Spirit photography started to fall outof fashion. It is interesting to consider that despite all ourtwenty-first century skepticism, there has been such aresurgence of interest and curiosity about these rituals ofmourning from the past. What has not changed is our need toprocess death and mourn for those we have loved. Many lookto the past for new ways of understanding. perhaps asnineteenth-century artist Eugène Delacroix wrote, “The new isvery old; you might even say it is the oldest thing of all.”9

Marie Carter, a writer, editor, and tour guide, is originally from Scotland.She is the author of the book, The Trapeze Diaries, and the forthcomingnovel, Holly’s Hurricane. She is also the editor of Word Jig: New Fiction fromScotland. Marie leads walking tours with Boroughs of the Dead in New YorkCity, a company that focuses on macabre, strange and ghostly histories,and lectures on a regular basis at Q.e.D. in Astoria, New York.

Notes

1. Stacy C. Hollander, “Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture inAmerica,” in Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture inAmerica, American Folk Art Museum. (New York: 2016) 27-28.

2. Hollander, 132.3. Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud,

Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. (Boston:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) 23.

4. American Battlefield Trust, “Civil War Facts,” www.battlefields.org,www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-facts. Accessed July 29,2018.

5. Photographs of battlefields also became popular at this time. Mostinfluential were the photographic works of Alexander Gardner.Manseau, 123.

6. Gail K. Smith, “The Sentimental Novel: The example of HarrietBeecher Stowe,” Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould (Cambridge:Cambridge university Press, 2001) 221.

7. Caleb Crain, “How Soon It May Be Too Late,” New York Times, August2, 2013.

8. A short lived journal “Devoted to the discovery and application ofTruth” concerned with the Spiritual and the Occult. It was publishedby A. J. Davis & Co. in New York between 1860 and 1864.

9. Artspace editors, “eugéne Delacroi Has the Answer to everything,”www.artspace.com/magazine/art 101/book report/phaidon-eugene-delacroix-quotes-54446. Accessed July 29, 2018.

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Bruce price, William Lee price Memorial, Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, pennsylvania, 1876. photo by Ralph Lieberman.

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Bruce Price and the“Purely Greek” Tombstone

Michael J. Lewis

Bruce price, the brilliant architect of Tuxedo park and theChateau Frontenac, cultivated no distinctive personal style, asdid H. H. Richardson and Frank Furness; he made no radicalinnovations, as did Louis Sullivan; he did not even haveinteresting vices like those that made Stanford White famous.His reputation rests entirely on the quality on his work, whichwas consistently tasteful, gracious, and imaginative. Leastknown of that work, but perhaps most imaginative, is the groupof poignant funeral monuments that he designed for his family,his friends, and himself.

One thinks of price as the quintessential New Yorker but hedid move there until he was in his early thirties.1 In fact, he wasa southerner, and one who found his loyalty sorely tested by theCivil War. He was born in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1845, theson of a prominent lawyer. He attended princeton University,briefly, and after the war broke out he withdrew, perhaps tojoin the Confederate army. At any rate he was apprehended bythe police on his way south with a carpet bag, a few monthsbefore Gettysburg.2 Opting for architecture instead of war, hespent the years from 1864 to 1868 in the office of Baltimorearchitect Rudolph Niernsee. He then withdrew along withfellow draftsman E. F. Baldwin to establish their own lucrativepartnership.3 But the partner who really mattered was price’swife.

In 1870 price married Josephine Lee, the daughter of awealthy and well-connected coal merchant from Wilkes-Barre,pennsylvania. The Lees were part of the anthracite aristocracy,one of the most financially secure and socially stable socialelites in American history. Sitting atop limitless wealth, theyneeded only to live respectable lives, promote art and culture,and marry one another’s daughters. They lived pleasantly inhospitable houses with generous verandas fronting theSusquehanna River. Having married into this fashionablesociety, price did not need to hustle for work; once he moved toWilkes-Barre in 1873, an endless pageant of these riverfrontmansions flowed from his office.4

These buildings gave him the theme of his career–thearchitecture of gracious leisure. The Chateau Frontenac inQuebec City is the most celebrated of resort hotels, but hedesigned many others, from Montreal and Banff Springs to BarHarbor and Long Island. His lifelong study of civilized leisureculminated at Tuxedo park, the fashionable summer resort hebuilt for pierre Lorillard outside New York City. All weredistinguished by a superb sense of good manners, how abuilding should comport itself and behave. And so we areobscurely pleased when we learn that price’s daughter wasEmily post, the author of the influential Guide to Etiquette,who made good manners her life’s cause.

Although price left for New York in 1877, he maintained tiesto Wilkes-Barre till the end of his life and when he died in 1903,

he was buried there under a memorial of his own design. Thisis in Hollenback Cemetery, the romantic rural cemetery thatserved the elite of the city. Within a few hundred paces areother tombstones from across price’s career, which trace thematuration of his thought as he tackled the same artisticproblem across three decades. Nowhere else is the arc of hiscareer laid out so clearly and in such concentrated form.

The earliest of these is the saddest object an architect canever design, a tombstone for his young child. William Lee pricewas barely two when he died in December 1875 and over hisgrave price raised a poignant Gothic marker.5 In a sharp gabledaedicule, he set a cherub, its form so detailed and specific thatit must be a portrait. Tombstone of this type are usually treatedas a symbolic house, with a gable carried on two piers thatframe a recessed panel. But here the central panel seems todetach itself from its frame and at the top it breaks free in anemphatic upward gesture. The angled ears at the side of thegable flare sharply outward, and the crocket at the apex splitsapart like a sprouting bud to burst into the flower that is thecross. perhaps these were too many formal ideas to cram intosuch a tiny shrine but the central motif is unmistakable andpoignant: price’s son rising heavenward as an angelic being.

price designed his son’s tomb when he was still in his HighVictorian Gothic phase. The medieval character, the sharpangularity of the moldings, the intersecting andinterpenetrating forms–all these were hallmarks of price’searly work. Only the customary polychromy is missing. He wasstill in this phase when he emerged on the national scene in1876, when the newly formed American Architect andBuilding News began regularly to publish his Wilkes-Barrework. But in that same year came the Centennial Exhibition inphiladelphia, when the country began to recoil from thepyrotechnics and structural drama of the High Victorian. Whenprice later spoke about his exuberant early work, it was withchagrin:

In the last period...everything must be quaint and odd,rooms shooting off at unexpected angles, orunexpectedly appearing where they were least wanted;rooms at various levels, with steps up or down to them;rambling strange affairs, a mixture of all sorts of oddsand ends. And yet, as abominable as the whole system is,I acquired a very considerable reputation in doing thesevery things of which I now absolutely disapprove.6

(Here one gets a foretaste of the distinctive voice of Emilypost, the charm and wit, but also a quick eye for the socialabominations.)

By the time price placed another family memorial at thecemetery, scarcely a decade later, the High Victorian intensitywas giving way to refinement and restraint. The grave markerof Washington Lee (1821-1883), his father-in-law, was once

again was an abstraction of a building, but in this case a domedclassical temple. price set it on a square base, and to use thetransition from square to circle to give it interest and tension.The base is beveled at the corners, each bevel turning into aprojecting bracket at the next level, then into a support for afluted pilaster in the superstructure. These pilasters flareoutwards to carry the circular dome above, giving thememorial a swollen silhouette that is anything but classical,despite the classical pedigree of its parts. At the apex is thesymbolic flame that the ancients used to represent eternity.

price may have been drawing on the elements of classicalarchitecture but he used them with uncommon freedom andimagination, without any show of archaeological pedantry. Hewas still a picturesque designer, and he had a weakness for

those three cardinal qualities of the picturesque: variety,contrast, and surprise. A more scholarly designer would havesmoothed the transition from square to circle, but at everystage price makes it bold and abrupt. And yet there arepassages of real delicacy, as in the gorgeously carved roses inthe panels between the pilasters. If this was a picturesquearchitecture, it was one that aspired to Beauty rather thanTruth, the watchword of the Gothic Revival. In that sense, theWashington Lee monument was the funerary counterpart toprice’s exquisite Shingle Style houses of the decade.

price, like most of his generation, embraced academicclassicism in the 1890s. In such impeccably studied works ashis American Surety Building in New York or his lovelyRichard Morris Hunt monument on Fifth Avenue at SeventiethStreet, along Central park, he eliminated the lively flashes ofpersonality that sparkle in his earlier work. And so it is fittingthat his ultimate memorial would be an imaginative butscholarly performance, the hillside pergola that marks his owngrave and that of his wife.7

price had no interest in a conventional temple-form

mausoleum; instead he made an open-air shrine, approachedfrom the north. The visitor climbs uphill, passes the grave ofyoung William, and faces a flight of stone steps, flanked by apair of upright stone slabs. These are modeled after Greekfunerary stelae, one for price and one for his wife. Beyondthese comes the stone platform, surrounded on three sides byDoric columns bearing a simple marble lintel. The columns areunfluted, except for a narrow band at the collar. And there is noroof, only a lattice of wooden beams, open to the sky.

The model for this was Greek, and it comes from remotestantiquity. In the Iliad, which draws on sources nearly amillennium older than Classical Greece, there are no templebuildings; the gods are worshipped at altars, under the opensky. price’s gentle hillside sanctuary was an abstraction of one

of these open-air altars, where the mystery of death might becontemplated under the heavens. It is significant that there isnothing archaeologically literal about the design, other thanthe stelae with their exquisitely carved palmettes.

It is curious that the imagery of the memorial is pagan, withno Christian references. One can only speculate what thatmeant, for price himself said nothing about it; we have only thevisual evidence.8 Although price was a gifted writer, who wrotea remarkably thoughtful essay on the design of suburbanhouses, otherwise he wrote very little.9 Fortunately, tuckedaway in a local newspaper, is  his program for one of hisWilkes-Barre monuments.10 Never again, as far as we know,would he speak so clearly and eloquently about the ideas andtheory that underpin his work.

George Woodward (1809-1875) was a lawyer anddistinguished politician, and one of the most influential figuresof the Democratic party in pennsylvania. At various times aUnited States Congressman, chief justice to the pennsylvaniaSupreme Court, and candidate for governor of pennsylvania,he just missed serving on the U. S. Supreme Court (nominated

Bruce price, Washington Lee Memorial, Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, pennsylvania, c. 1883. Bruce price, Bruce and Josephine price Memorial,Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, pennsylvania, c. 1903. photos by Ralph Lieberman.

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by president polk, he was not confirmed by the senate). Hisviews were in many respects noxious. Woodward was anapologist for slavery, who notoriously claimed that “Humanbondage and property in man is divinely sanctioned, if notordained.”11 And yet he was also one of Wilkes-Barre’s mostdistinguished citizens, and so when it came to designing hisfuneral monument it was natural that his family should turn toprice.12

Rather than designing a generic monument, price aimed forsomething that would express the specific qualities ofWoodward’s personality and his career. It was to speak “of theman and his profession, of his force of character, of his vigor ofintellect and purity of life, of his dignity and worth, and of themajesty of the great calling to which his life was devoted.” Thiswas a tall order, for Woodward was not a particularly warm orappealing personality. Rather, he was imperious andforbidding, and spoke with a bluntness that disconcerted evenhis friends. Frank Gowen, the president of the ReadingRailroad and a close friend, confessed that Woodward “did notknow tact. He did not know the meaning of the word”–an oddsentiment to find in a funeral tribute.13 Woodward’s physicalappearance was as arresting as his character; he wasuncommonly tall and slender, and spoke with a “peculiarmelody of voice.”14 All this made him a challenging subject torender, unless literally in a statue.

But instead of a statue, or any other conventionalmonument, price conceived an entirely new form, a poeticmetaphor that he took from the ancient funeral pyre:

the traditional pile upon which the ancient Athenianburned his illustrious dead...A great pile battering upfrom its base to its summit was built of wood and otherinflammable materials; upon this heap was laid the bodyof the hero, and...consigned to the flames.15

A funeral pyre is the most temporary of all architecturalobjects, but price was captivated by its formal qualities, itscompact silhouette and its mighty tapered shape. Of course,such a pyre is pagan and Woodward was a lifelongEpiscopalian. To remove its exclusively pagan character, priceplaced atop his pyre “with arms out-stretched toheaven, the Christian’s sacrifice–the cross.”And just as the Greeks adorned the heads oftheir heroes with laurel leaves, price marked thehead and arms and head of the cross withbronze wreaths, now lost but visible in hisdrawing.16

price’s greatest challenge was to evoke thecharacter of his subject, and entirely throughabstract means. Woodward’s “firmness andendurance” was conveyed by its boldly batteredshape while “the idea of the masculine” wasexpressed in the bold rustication. And indeed,the sense is of a mighty implacable personality,willful and determined, but also quivering withnervous energy. As for Woodward’s legacy, themonument’s discs or paterae were “emblems ofthe immortality of the soul” and its frieze ofstars at its inscribed tablet represented“Christianity and (among the ancients) fame.”

price proclaimed that the Woodwardmonument was “purely Greek,” a curious boastfor something with none of the devices of

classical architecture–column, cornice, or pediment–but withthe cross of Christianity. Yet there is more than one way ofemulating the ancient Greeks; one can copy their forms or copytheir principles. This was the insight of the Néo-Grec, theFrench intellectual movement of the 1820s that revitalizedthinking about classical architecture. The young radicalarchitects who created the doctrine knew that the ancients didnot design with their nose in books, measuring details withcalipers; they designed with imaginative freedom. Followers ofthis movement could only look with contempt on the literalGreek Revival, with its craze for spurious but archaeologicallycorrect parthenons.

For price, who had grown up in an orthodox Greek Revivalhouse, an 1842 performance by John Notman, the Néo-Grecwas a revelation. He would have learned of it from the architectHenry van Brunt, whose essay “Greek Lines” gave Americanreaders its first cogent account of the new movement.17 Thearticle appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer of1861, just as price was preparing himself for princeton, and wecan be certain that price read every word. His essay on theWoodward monument, printed in the appendix below, isunimaginable without it. In particular, price noted what “GreekLines” had to say about funereal monuments:

Structures of this character, demanding earnestly intheir composition the expression of human sentiment,have hitherto been in most cases unsatisfactory, havingbeen built out of a narrow range of Renaissance,Egyptian and Gothic motives, originally invented for fardifferent purposes, and, since then, classified, as it were,for use, and reduced to that inflexible system out ofwhich have come the formal restrictions of modernarchitecture. Hence these motives have never come nearenough to human life, in its individual characteristics, tobe plastic for the expression of those emotions to whichwe desire to give the immortality of stone in memory ofdeparted friends.18

In other words, conventionalized forms were impersonaland could never provide “an architectural version of the life

Bruce price, Woodward Monument, American Architect and Building News, August 5, 1876,

and public services of the distinguished deceased.” For this,only abstract forms and lines suited.

The taut elasticity of the Woodward monument, and therazor-sharp incision of its details and moldings, suggest first-hand inspection of actual Néo-Grec monuments. Did pricemake a pilgrimage to see the funeral monuments in paris thatVan Brunt praised? It seems likely.19 The startling tomb ofAdmiral Dumont d’Urville in Montparnasse Cemetery,designed by Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux, would likely havebeen at the top of his list. At any rate, the Woodwardmonument reveals that price in 1876 was far more than aprovincial American architect, diligently keeping up with thelatest productions of the English Gothic Revival, and that hewas intensely interested in the intellectual argument for apurely abstract design, not beholden to the specific ornamentof the various period style.

The “purely Greek” Woodward Monument is unique inprice’s career, but it is essential to understanding his laterwork, particularly those brilliant Shingle Style cottages atTuxedo park that he created in a single heroic bout in 1885-1886. Each is remarkable for its poetry of silhouette and mass,none more so than the cottage of Henry I. Barbey, whoseshingled surfaces slope and tilt inward as it were tryingdesperately to be a pyramid. The effect is akin to entasis, theGreek word for the expressive swelling of a column underpressure. (The original word referred to the bulging of a formwhen exerted, as when an arm muscle swells when pulling thestring of a bow.) The resemblance would seem entirelycoincidental except for the Woodward monument, which is themissing link between the radical Néo-Grec of early nineteenth-century France and the abstract Shingle Style compositions oflate nineteenth-century America.20 If no one spoke of the Néo-

Grec by that point, this is not because its insights were passébut because they had passed into the mainstream ofarchitectural thought.

Emily post once wrote that “letters of condolence are likelove letters, in that they are too sacred to follow a set form.”Her father seems to have felt the same thing about thetombstone, which is the architectural manifestation ofcondolence. None of his follow a set form, as we learn from asmall cemetery in northeastern pennsylvania, where the wholeof his career is reprised in miniature by the poignant objects hecreated for the most silent and obliging of all his clients.

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Michael J. Lewis is the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard professor of art at WilliamsCollege. Among his books are Frank Furness: Architecture and the ViolentMind; The Politics of the German Gothic Revival; and the just published Cityof Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning, from Princetonuniversity Press.

Bruce price, Woodward Monument, Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, pennsylvania, 1876. photo by Ralph Lieberman.

Acknowledgements:I am deeply indebted to that trio of Baltimore scholars,Carlos p. Avery, Randolph Chalfant, and Jim Dilts, whounstintingly shared their knowledge of Bruce price. I amalso especially grateful to David B. Brownlee who patientlysupervised the first version of this essay, an M.A. paperwritten more years ago than I would care to count.

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Notes

1. Although there is no modern biography, there is a dissertation: seeSamuel H. Graybill, Jr., “Bruce Price, American Architect (1824-1903),” diss., Yale university, 1957.

2. “Local Matters, Charged with Attempting to Go South,” BaltimoreSun (March 27, 1863), p. 1.

3. randolph Chalfant and Charles Belfoure, Niernsee and Nielson,Architects of Baltimore (Baltimore: Baltimore ArchitectureFoundation, 2006); Carlos P. Avery, E. Francis Baldwin: The B&O,Baltimore and Beyond (Baltimore: Baltimore ArchitectureFoundation, 2003).

4. Price faced one competitor in Wilkes-Barre, Willis G. Hale (1848-1907), who did not enjoy the same social connections and had tomake do designing schools and cast-iron storefronts. Hale wouldlater win fame as Phildelphia’s great architectural eccentric.

5. Obituary, Daily Record of the Times (December 7, 1875), p. 3.6. Bruce Price, quoted in Barr Ferree, “A Talk with Bruce Price,” in Great

American Architects Series (New York: Da Capo, 1979), p. 44,reprinted from Architectural Record, June 1899.

7. Price died in 1903 in Paris, having gone there to recuperate from anundisclosed stomach ailment that proved to be cancer. JosephinePrice died six years later, a very early automobile fatality. See “Mrs.Bruce Price Meets Tragic end in Auto Accident in York State,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (Oct. 18, 1909) p. 1.

8. Price’s monument bears are similar to his George A. Fuller memorial,Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago. See the Inland Architect, XXXVII, no.6 (July 1901).

9. Bruce Price, “The Suburban House,” Scribner’s Magazine VIII (July1890), pp. 3-19.

10. Bruce Price, “The Woodward Monument–erected in HollenbeckCemetery, Wilkes-Barre, Pa.,” Wilkes-Barre Record (February 22,1878), p. 4.

11. See the rebuke in Frances Anne Kemble, The Views of JudgeWoodward and Bishop Hopkins on Negro Slavery at the South(Philadelphia: union League, 1863), p. 3.

12. Daily Record of the Times (Sept. 12, 1876), p. 2.13. “George Washington Woodward,” Luzerne Legal Register, vol. 4, no.29 (July 16, 1875) p. 194, p. 204.14. Ibid., p. 208.15. “The Woodward Monument,” American Architect and Building

News (August 5, 1876).16. Ibid.17. Henry van Brunt, “Greek Lines,” Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 44 (June

1861), pp. 654-668; 8, no. 45 (July 1861), pp. 76-88.18. Ibid, p. 86.19. But when did this happen? In one account, Price “spent nearly a

year abroad” before commencing his partnership with Baldwin in1868: “Bruce Price Dies in Paris,” Baltimore Sun (May 30, 1903), p.2. Or is it true that in 1872 Washington Lee “offered to send him andhis wife to europe, for a year of combined study and pleasureproviding he would take his mother-in-law along”? “Museumreceives ebony Gem Chest from emily Post,” MontgomeryAdvertiser (April 11, 1954), p. 12 C.

20. For Price and the Shingle Style, see Vincent J. Scully, Jr., The ShingleStyle and The Stick Style (New Haven: Yale university Press, 1971).For the Barbey House, and other work by Bruce at Tuxedo Park, seeGeorge William Sheldon, Artistic Country-Seats: Types of RecentAmerican Villa and Cottage Architecture with Instances of CountryClub-Houses (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1886/87), reprinted asAmerican Country Houses of the Gilded Age (Dover, 1982).

“The Woodward Monument–Erected in Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, pa.”Bruce price (1824-1903)

The motif of this structure is the Greek Funeral pyre, the traditional pile upon which the ancient Athenian burned his illustrious dead. A great pile battering up from its base to its summit was built of wood and other inflammable materials; upon this heap was laid the

body of the hero, and with him whatever, (whether things of life or inanimate) was most intimately linked with his fame. The whole, withfuneral rites, was consigned to the flames; the embers at last were extinguished with oil and wine, the ashes of the dead collected, and withthe bones—which were cleansed with oil and wine—were placed with sacred care in an urn. Whatever of ritual, as well as authority, therewas for these rites at the pyre—as well as at the tomb—came from their great law-giver, Solon, who revised the Greek funeral ceremoniesand gave laws for governing them. We can borrow the thought that poetical justice would make the type of the Greek pyre an appropriateideal for a memorial to a great Jurist.

The burning of the body and its accompanying sacrificial rites was an Eastern custom as old as history. In their classical superstitionthe soul of the cremated ascended to heaven, or to a region of eternal bliss, upon the fumes of the burning altar. The dead lay upon its backwith open arms and face to the sky. Amidst chant or dirge, the flames leap up and all is consumed; the ashes are gathered in the urn, andthese few cinders, housed in their pot of baked clay, become the memorial of even their greatest. The Greeks rarely raised monuments topersons. It is but a step from these classic ceremonies to their embodiment into an ideal that shall have form and shall last.

Built of most enduring stone, we rear our pyre at the feet of him whose memory we perpetuate; upon its summit we lay with arms out-stretched to heaven, the Christian’s sacrifice—the cross. As if hewn from the living rock it lays in its rigid purity, its arms resting uponconsoles wreathed with circlets or immortelles. In the cornice are paterae, or discs, emblems of the immortality of the soul, and of theimperishable. Upon the tablets are bands with the stars symbolizing Christianity and (among the ancients) fame. Of the schools of plasticart, the Greek lends itself most happily to such a work. Its perfect simplicity and refinement make its selection the most appropriate. Ourmonument is therefore purely Greek, and every detail that can lend dignity to the work has been borrowed. The battering or sloping up ofthe line of the structure gives it firmness and endurance. Its boldly rusticated construction gives it dignity and embodies the idea of themasculine, and of firmness and power both in the law and in the man. A simple corniced band unites the whole and gives unity andharmony. At the foot of the cross and forming part of the structure, stand in purity of line and surface—like the pylons at the tombs of thekings—the great dies, and speak upon their memorial tablets the purpose of the pile. As for the style of the work its prototype proclaimsits fitness—for its success as a monument must depend upon its embodiment of the character of him to whom it is reared. So, in itscomposition the studious effort has been to make it speak of itself, of the man and his profession, of his force of character, of his vigor ofintellect and purity of life, of his dignity and worth, and of the majesty of the great calling to which his life was devoted. Such has been theproblem, the work as it stands is the effort to embody it.

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A Tale of Two Graves:Barilla Adeline Taylor and Louisa Maria Wells“Mill Girls” of Lowell, MassachusettsBridget M. Marshall

Reprises

Reprinted with permission of the author and the publisher,AGS Quarterly Bulletin of The Association for GravestoneStudies.

Lowell, Massachusetts is perhaps best known for being thebirthplace of Beat writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), andKerouac’s grave (located in the city’s Edson Cemetery) is likelythe most popular gravestone in Lowell. For those interested infurther graveyard tourism, there is no better spot to visit thanthe Lowell Cemetery. Dedicated on June 20, 1841, it wasmodeled on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge (foundedin 1831), which is known as the first “Garden Cemetery” (morefrequently referred to as a “Rural Cemetery” then) in theUnited States.1 A February 1842 account appearing in theMagazine of Horticulture described the Lowell Cemetery as“eminently picturesque and beautiful,”2 and in 1998, LowellCemetery was put on the National Register of Historic places.We know that many of the girls who worked in the Lowellmills in the mid-nineteenth century enjoyed taking walksthrough the cemetery during their limited leisure hoursbecause they wrote about such cemetery rambles in theirmagazine, The Lowell Offering (1840-1845).3 The cemeterycontains at least three graves of former mill girls. Of particularinterest are two monuments that are less than a hundredyards apart–one for Barilla Taylor (1828-1845) and one forLouisa Maria Wells (1818-1886). The stark difference betweenthem is immediately noticeable in comparing the size of themonuments. Taylor’s simple stone is flat on the ground,measuring fifty inches by twenty-two inches, with the edges ofits outline covered by grass; Well’s monument can be seenfrom Taylor’s, standing at thirteen feet tall and more than sixfeet wide, a sculpture portraying larger-than-life humanfigures.

The two women–whose deaths were just forty yearsapart–both worked in the mills of Lowell as “operatives,” sotermed at the time because they were operating looms andother machinery. Their monuments (and the stories of howthey got there) reveal complicated stories of families dealingwith the deaths of single working women in the nineteenthcentury.

Barilla Adeline Taylor (1828-1845)Born in Roxbury, Maine on June 29, 1828, fifteen-year-oldBarilla Taylor headed to Lowell to seek employment in

October of 1843, where she found work at the Hamilton Mills.She was one of nearly 30,000 women who by that time hadleft their homes across New England to come to Lowell towork. Whether she was sickly before she arrived, or whetherher illness was brought on by her working and livingconditions is unclear, but she died on August 22, 1845, at theage of just seventeen. Records indicate that she died inAndover; the cause was “typhoid fever.”4 What we know of heralmost two-year stint in Lowell comes from letters written andreceived by Taylor and her family that provide intriguingdetails, but leave much unexplained. On July 14, 1844, Barilla

The Lowell Offering, a magazine written by the “mill girls” of Lowell,Massachusetts, c. 1840.

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wrote to her parents and told them of her good health, but sheremarks that at her first boarding house, she was given little toeat, and says “I was sick there, and I dont wonder;”5 she alsomentions that she still has a doctor bill to pay. Letters indicatethat the family was apprised of her illness, but due to limitedfinances, they were not able to get to her or bring her homebefore she died. pliny Tidd (a friend of Byron Taylor, Barilla’solder brother) wrote a letter to Barilla’s father on March 5,1846–almost seven months after her death–indicating that hehad had Barilla’s body moved to the Lowell Cemetery inNovember of 1845. The specifics of why and how are notexplained; however, the letter does explain, in considerabledetail, the costs of the stone. Tidd writes:

I have had Barilla moved to the cemetery at Lowell onthe 14 of Nov. 1845. Also the stones put up, the whole ofthem is $12.75. I had a name put on, the cost of whichwas 1.12 the putting them up, 50 cts. These I claim to payfor, which will leave the cost to you at only $11.12. Theyare all good strate stones and engraved in good taste.6

The whole cost of $12.75 is about $412.00 in today’s terms.7

Another way to consider this cost is to look at what $12.75 wasat the time: consider that Barilla’s average wage for an entiremonth’s work at Hamilton Mills was about $12.00.8

Tidd claims that Barilla’s stone is “in good taste,” and it isindeed a modest, simple marker; it lies flat in the ground andis easily overlooked. At the top is the urn and willow motif thatis quite common to stones of that period. The engraving reads:

Barilla A./ daughter of Stephen B. /& Melinda Taylor, / Died Aug. 22, 1845 /Æt 17 yrs.

Four lines of a poem appear beneath:

Is there a thought, sad sorrow healingwhich can a while your grief suspend?Yes! there is a sweet, a holy feeling,‘Tis the remembrance of a friend!

The untitled poem is a popular one from the time. Itappears in a least one book dating as far back as 1834–PartingGift to a Christian Friend–and is reprinted in many gift booksfeaturing popular sentimental poetry of the time. At the verybottom of the stone it indicates “Of Roxbury, ME.” Barilla’sstone does not particularly attract attention; but about ahundred yards away, another mill girl’s monument isdefinitely a major attraction for this cemetery.

Louisa Marie Wells (1818-1886)Born in 1818 in proctorsville, Vermont, Louisa Wellseventually (it’s not clear when) moved to Lawrence,Massachusetts, where, when she was thirty-two years old, sheworked at the Atlantic Mills. By 1860, she moved to Lowell,where records indicate she lived with her widowed mother,and she continued employment as a mill hand. By 1874, at age

Louisa M. Wells (1818-1886) monument. photo by Bridget Marshall.Reprinted with permission from The Association of Gravestone Studies.

Gravestone of Barilla A. Taylor (1828-1846). photo by Bridget Marshall.Reprinted with permission from The Association of Gravestone Studies.

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fifty-seven, she was “residing in her own home” at 261 VarnumAvenue in Lowell. She died in 1886, at the age of sixty-eight inLowell, with cause of death listed as “Disease of heart.”9 Shehad already purchased two plots in the Lowell Cemetery, onefor herself and the other for her mother, who was alreadyburied there. This is where the story gets interesting.

Wells’ will specifically stated that all her remaining moneywas to be used to erect “a suitable and proper monument” onher already-purchased grave in the Lowell Cemetery. It turnedout that at her death, there was something around $8,000.00in her estate, a substantial sum for the time, and indeed, aremarkable sum for a grave marker. To put that sum incontext, according to the 1888 Annual Report of the Trusteesof Lowell Cemetery, cemetery lots there cost $250.00 at thattime;10 a lot in the Lowell Cemetery in 2015 costs $1,200.00.11

While accurate comparative calculations for the value are hardto determine, the most conservative calculations suggest thatWells’ $8,000.00 in 1886 would equate to roughly$200,000.00 in 2015 dollars.12

Wells had never married and had no children, but she didhave other relatives, and at least one of them was not happyabout the plan to spend this grand sum on a grave marker.Josephine Leland Chase, who was a first cousin to Louisa(Louisa’s mother’s brother was Josephine’s father) contestedthe will, initiating a lawsuit that dragged on for almost twentyyears. According to the suit Davis v. Chase,13 the plaintiffsindicated that $8,000.00 was not a “suitable and proper”amount of money to spend on such a memorial. Chase’slawyer pointed to the fact that “the will was dated twelve yearsbefore her death,” suggesting that at the time she wrote thewill, she did not have as much money, and presumably wouldnot have left such a large sum for that purpose. According tothe legal brief, the distant heirs contended that “only a portionof the property” should be used for

fitting up the burial lot [ ], and that the rest of the fundshould be distributed among the heirs at law and next ofkin.14

The most significant next-of-kin was of course JosephineChase (who was married with six children at the time).Josephine Chase–who had lived in Lowell since at least1880–stood to gain considerably if she could overturn the will.In 1902, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced,

if a single woman not otherwise distinguished should beminded to prolong the remembrance of her family nameby a beautiful monument over her grave, we could notpronounce it unsuitable or improper as a matter of law.15

Thus, in this ruling–made in 1902, almost sixteen yearsafter her death–the court decided that Louisa was to have hermonument, to be paid from her assets worth at least$8,000.00 plus interest.

In the intervening years, Wells’ original executor (JohnDavis) had died, and the cause of Wells’ monument fell toGeorge F. Richardson, who, according to a 1904 article in theLowell Daily Courier, desired to make sure that themonument “would reflect credit upon the deceased lady, andat the same time benefit the city of Lowell.”16 His interest notmerely that the monument honor Louisa, but also somehow

benefit the city seems to suggest that, like the disgruntledheirs, he too believed that such a huge sum of money shouldnot be spent merely to memorialize just one woman.

With more than $8,000.00 to spend, Richardson reachedout to a sculptor with ties to the area and to his own family:Daniel Chester French. French is well known now as thecreator of the 1920 Lincoln Memorial in Washington D. C., butat that time he was already well-known for the Minute Manstatue in Concord (1875) and John Harvard in the HarvardYard (1884). French accepted the commission for the Wellsmonument in 1904; his account book indicates that he had acontract with George Richardson to complete the sculpture byJune of 1906, for the amount of $5,000.00. (I’ve not yet beenable to figure out where the remaining $3,000.00 went,though the purchase of a base, transportation and installationof the monument, and legal fees all seem to be likely, if stillunconfirmed answers.) The already well-known French hadmany commissions at the time, and handed this one off to anassistant named Evelyn Beatrice Longman. French’s recordsindicate from the start that “All [money for the Wells contract]goes to Miss Longman,” and his accounts indicate that hemade regular advances to her for the work until he receivedthe payment from Richardson. While some contemporaryarticles continued to refer to French as the sculptor, recordsmake it clear that Longman was the artist. An articleappearing in the New York Times in December of 1906praised Longman’s work on the monument,17 and Longmandeserves to be more well-known today. One particular piece ofher work that art historian Ellen Wiley Todd has suggested hasa connection to the Wells monument is her Triangle FireMemorial to the Unknowns in the Evergreens Cemetery,Brooklyn, a 1912 monument erected on the gravesite of the146 workers, almost all of them women, who were killed in theTriangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.18

The Wells monument is beautiful and impressive, standingthirteen feet high. It features a seated female mill worker,apparently at rest, with a bobbin in her hand. An enormouswinged female angel figure appears behind the mill girl,reaching out to touch her shoulder. The inscription on thebase of the monument reads:

Out of the fibre of her daily tasksshe wove the fabric of a useful lifeLouisa Maria WellsDied February 20 1886

The monument immediately became a celebrated andmuch-visited site in the city. In 1928, an article in the LowellSun declared that “scores of visiting tourists inquire of the‘Mill Girl Monument,’”19 and in 1936, F. W. Coburn wrote in aLowell paper admiringly about what he called “our city’snoblest work of sculptured art.”20

Numerous newspapers over the years have re-told the storyof the Wells monument, typically portraying Wells as a poorworker who saved carefully and who ultimately won a battle(from beyond the grave) against greedy heirs. They frequentlyrefer to her as “little,” although we have no records indicatingher height. Given the lack of detailed personal informationabout Wells, it’s clear that later generations have filled in somedetails to make the story more poignant. A 1921 Boston Post

article, titled “Little Weaver’s Dream Realized” is typical in itstone; it refers to Wells as “this humble little weaver,” and toher “simple, hard-working life.”21 A similar article in theBurlington (Iowa) Gazette titled “Dream Fulfilled,” notes withsatisfaction that “Louisa’s life dream is to be fulfilled. The poorlittle weaver girl rests among the mighty.”22 It’s not at all clearthat it was Louisa’s “life dream” to be buried in LowellCemetery or to have such a grand monument. The repeatednarrative trope of the “poor little mill girl” that appears inthese and other stories is particularly problematic, especiallyif we compare Wells’ situation to that of Barilla Taylor, or tomost other women who worked in the mills of Lowell. It isvery doubtful that Wells could have saved up that huge sum ofmoney only through her mill wages. The fact that she ownedher own home suggests that there was perhaps family moneythat augmented her resources. We do know that she worked inthe mills, but it seems likely that her fortune resulted at leastin part from something other than mere thriftiness. The Postarticle claims that “the mill girl’s dream is to stand forever asa spiritual inspiration to coming generations”; in such articles,Louisa is held up as a model of how even a “poor mill girl” can(theoretically) save a tidy fortune, thus she is a model for agood poor–or working-class–woman. Indeed, compared tomany of her fellow mill girls, Louisa’s story is inspirational.She clearly made a good life for herself in Lowell, and lived tothe age of sixty-eight; her life expectancy at her birth in 1818would have been about forty, and life expectancy in 1850 for awhite woman of her age in Massachusetts was around sixty-five.23 By contrast, Barilla Taylor, born ten years after LouisaWells, lived to only seventeen. Barilla’s story, in which her

family and friends had to scrape together the funds to erecteven her modest stone in the cemetery, is far more commonfor the girls who came to Lowell. The markers for BarillaTaylor and Louisa Wells remind us of yet another story thatgrave markers can tell us: the economic realities in which theylived and died. While the inscriptions on cemetery markersdon’t include a price tag, the size and form of the monumentscan tell us quite a lot about the economic situation of thedeceased. Wells’ grand monument and Taylor’s simple stonetell very different versions of what life was like for Lowell’snineteenth century mill operatives, pointing to the diversity ofpersonal and economic situations that motivated women tomove away from home to factory cities during the AmericanIndustrial Revolution.

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Notes

1. Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: Theestablishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘rural Cemetery’Movement,” American Quarterly, 26.1 (1974): 37-59. JSTOr. Web. 27June 2013. 38.

2. W. Art. II. “An Account of the Lowell Cemetery, its Situation,Historical Associations and Particular Description.” Magazine ofHorticulture, Botany, and All Useful Discoveries and Improvements inRural Affairs. ed. Charles Mason Hovey, 1842-49. Googlebooks.com

3. A writer going by the name “elizabeth” describes walking through thecemetery for pleasure in her description of “My First IndependenceDay in Lowell” in the November 1845 issue of the Lowell Offering(249). The author of “A Letter to Cousin Lucy,” appearing in the May1845 Lowell Offering, explains, “The Cemetery is a hallowed retreatif we want to take a walk for meditation.” (111).

4. “Barilla Taylor, 21 Aug 1845.” Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915.Volume 20, Page 74. State Archives, Boston. FHL microfilm 959,808.Familysearch.org

5. Barilla Taylor. Letter to Stephen and Melinda Taylor. Lowell. July 14,1844. Virginia Taylor Collection.

6. Pliny Tidd. Letter to Mr. Taylor. Lowell. March 5, 1846. Virginia TaylorCollection.

7. Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the relative Valueof a u. S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present.” Measuring Worth, May27, 2015.

8. “Payroll Volume 308.” Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records.Baker Library, Harvard Business School. reproduced in The World ofBarilla Taylor: Lowell Industrial Learning Experience, 1993.

9. Massachusetts Vital records. Ancestry.com10. Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of Lowell Cemetery to the

Proprietors, 1888. Lowell: Morning Mail Print. 1888.Googlebooks.com.

11. “Lot Sales & Fees,” Lowell Cemetery, May 27, 2015.12. Williamson, ibid.13. Davis v. Chase, Massachusetts Reports 181: Cases Argued and

Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts:February 1902-June 1902. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1903. 39-41.

14. Davis v. Chase. 40.15. Davis v. Chase. 41.16. “Memorial of Louisa Wells,” Lowell Daily Courier. July 9, 1904.17. “Current Matters of the Arts,” New York Times. December 30, 1906.

30. Newspaperarchive.com.18. ellen Wiley Todd, “remembering the unknowns,” American Art

23.3 (Fall 2009): 60-81. 61.19. “Neat Monument Will Mark the Grave of Lowell Mill Girl,” Lowell

Sun, August 11, 1904. Page 11.20. F. W. Coburn, “Wells Memorial in the Lowell Cemetery Noblest

Work of Sculptured Art.” Courier-Citizen, Lowell Centennial Edition.June 30, 1936: 33. Center for Lowell History.

21. “Little Weaver’s Dream realized,” Boston Post, November 21, 1921.Page 6.

22. “Dream Fulfilled,” Burlington Gazette (Iowa). November 28, 1921.Page 7.

23. David Hacker, “Figure 6: Life expectancy at Birth.” Decennial LifeTables for the White Population of the united States, 1790-1900.Historical Methods. 2010 Apr; 43(2): 45-79. From author manuscriptonline. Doi: 10.1080/01615441003720449.

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Bridget M. Marshall is an Associate Professor of english at the universityof Massachusetts, Lowell. She teaches courses on Gothic novels, disabilityin literature, and American literature more generally. She is the author ofThe Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860 (Ashgate 2011),and co-editor of Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in theLong Nineteenth Century (Ashgate 2013). She is currently working on aproject focused on the interconnections between Gothic literature andthe Industrial revolution.

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Beating the BodysnatchersAllison C. Meier

Reprinted with permission of the author and the WellcomeCollection

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an expansion inthe study of anatomy at medical schools fueled a brisk trade ingrave robbing. As a result, families sought to protect theirloved ones’ remains. One method of keeping thebodysnatchers at bay was the use of mortsafes.

In the Scottish hamlet of Towie, a rusted metal crown risesfrom the churchyard. It’s a rare relic from an era of rampantfear of grave robbing, when contraptions called mortsafesprotected the newly dead. Made of iron and sometimesincorporating a heavy stone lid, a mortsafe enclosed a coffin todefend it from interference. The Towie example is one ofseveral photographed and described by James Ritchie in “AnAccount of the Watch-houses, Mortsafes, and public Vaults inAberdeenshire Churchyards, formerly used for the protectionof the Dead from the Resurrectionists,” published in the 1911–12 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.1

“It is difficult for those of the present generation to realizethe feelings of horror with which bodysnatching was regardedabout a century ago,” Ritchie begins.2 A teacher at portElphinstone School in Scotland, he was also an amateurphotographer who contributed illustrated articles to theSociety of Antiquaries, such as studies of prehistoric stonecircles in Central Aberdeenshire.3 (His passion likely inspiredhis son, naturalist James Ritchie.)

A Dread of DissectionThe terror of grave robbers, or resurrection men came aboutwhen a rise in anatomical and surgical study met a limitedcadaver supply. In Great Britain and the United States,dissection was a punishment for executed criminals, and legalavenues for acquiring corpses were restricted beyond thegallows. So, if you had the stomach for it, money could bemade by hauling carcasses out of their graves and selling themto anatomists.

The British Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed anatomicalschools the use of unclaimed bodies, but anxiety lingered. InScotland, the well-publicized 1828 trial of William Burke andWilliam Hare (who bypassed grave robbing altogether andkilled people to sell their corpses) further fueled this dread.Not even doctors wanted to be dissected: London anatomistSir Astley Cooper—who had boasted “there is no person, let hissituation in life be what it may, whom, if I were disposed todissect, I could not obtain”4—was in 1841 interred in multiplecoffins within a stone sarcophagus.5 Meanwhile in the UnitedStates, a series of similar acts were passed, including the 1854Bone Bill in New York that allowed the unclaimed to bedissected, and the pennsylvania Anatomy Act of 1883 whichsimilarly permitted medical schools to utilize unclaimedbodies, although there were still only so many of those to goaround.

Non-white and poor cemeteries were often targeted by

grave robbing, particularly in the United States their burialgrounds were usually located on the desolate edges of cities. Asimple safeguard might be placing flowers or a heavy rock on

Top to bottom: Mortsafe in Towie churchyard, Aberdeenshire. Vault withmortsafe in graveyard at Udny, Aberdeenshire. Courtesy WellcomeCollection.

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the fresh earth, although a diligent grave robber could justreplace them. A late 1820s edition of Freedom’s Journal, anAfrican-American newspaper, advised readers to layer strawand earth so it would take more time to disturb a burial.6

Recent excavation at the New Churchyard, in London, as partof the Crossrail project revealed an eighteenth-century coffinfilled with sand and covered with rocks.

Stones, Safes, and Societies Before the appearance of the iron mortsafes around 1816,8

large stones were sometimes employed. Ritchie documented acoffin-shaped granite block at Inverurie Churchyard, addingthat Inverurie’s proximity to the university at Aberdeen,Scotland, and the location of its graveyard outside of town,“afforded a tempting means of procuring the specimensrequired by the students.”9 Nevertheless, a stone was littledeterrent. Ritchie explained how a grave robber could digdown on one end of it to the coffin, where they

then fastened a rope round the neck of the corpse anddragged it out, afterwards filling up the hole andremoving, as far as possible, all traces of their work.10

Mortsafes, iron coffin lids, and coffin collars around necksbetter secured the body for the weeks it needed to grow putrid,and therefore useless for anatomy. In Bodysnatchers:Digging Up the Untold Stories of Britain’s Resurrection Men,author Suzie Lennox states that parishes “would oftenpurchase one or two mortsafes and subsequently hire themout as required.”11 An 1888 issue of North-Country Lore andLegend described a Mortsafe Society “which undertook theguarding of coffins on payment of a small sum per annum”[sic].12

Rare Relics and Recycled RemainsDespite being designed to be temporary, some mortsafes werepermanent, and could be above or below ground. In 2013, anineteenth-century coffin was excavated in West Bromwich,England, with the remains of a young woman who apparently

suffered from a disfiguring bone and skin disease. Her bodyhad been protected inside the coffin by a metal cage. Herdisease likely made her body desirable for theft.13 GreyfriarsChurchyard in Edinburgh, a stone’s throw from the OldMedical School, still has a couple of iron cages, while inCatawissa, pennsylvania’s Mt. Zion Cemetery, two birdcage-like iron structures, now nicknamed the Hooded Graves, hintat the unease radiating around the philadelphia medicalschools.

When Ritchie set out to document mortsafes inAberdeenshire, few were extant. In fact, he found some reusedas watering troughs, one at an Upper Mills farm cleverlyinstalled under a wall dividing two fields, so cattle on bothsides could drink from the coffin shape. In the 1920–21Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, heshared his supplementary notes, including the new discoveryof a surviving mortsafe tackle at Inverurie, used to lift thehefty metal enclosures.14

Over the years, most mortsafes were discarded or theirmetal recycled. But Ritchie thought they were worth noticingto remember those decades of medical advancement and fearof fates worse than death. He wrote,

They are interesting as memorials of a time now rapidlypassing into oblivion, when the feelings of the peoplewere deeply stirred, and they were willing to suffer muchinconvenience and to make many sacrifices to preservethe bodies of their dead friends from shamefuldesecration.15

Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visualculture. She was previously senior editor at Atlas Obscura and morerecently a staff writer at Hyperallergic. She moonlights as a cemetery tourguide. More of her writing can be found at allisoncmeier.com

Notes

1. Images from his survey are now in the Wellcome Collection museumand library in London, accessed July 30, 2018,wellcomecollection.org/works?query=mortsafe.

2. James ritchie, “An Account of the Watch-houses, Mortsafes, andPublic Vaults in Aberdeenshire Churchyards, formerly used for theProtection of the Dead from the resurrectionists,” Society ofAntiquaries of Scotland, Volume 46 (1911-12): 285-326.

3. James ritchie, “Folklore of the Aberdeenshire Stone Circles andStanding-stones,” Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Volume 60(1925-26): 304-13.

4. The Lancet London: A Journal of British and Foreign Medicine,Surgery, Obstetrics, Physiology, Chemistry, Pharmacology, PublicHealth and News, Volume 2 (1828): 726.

5. roger French and Andrew Wear, British Medicine in an Age of Reform(Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine) (London:routledge, 1991) 82.

6. “Body-snatchers,” Science Museum, London, accessed July 30, 2018,oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/blog/2017/07/27/crossrai l-new-churchyard/.

8. Peter Brown, Essex Witches (Stroud, uK: The History Press, 2014).9. James ritchie, “An Account of the Watch-houses, Mortsafes, and

Public Vaults in Aberdeenshire Churchyards, formerly used for theProtection of the Dead from the resurrectionists,” Society ofAntiquaries of Scotland, Volume 46 (1911-12): 296.

10. James ritchie, “An Account of the Watch-houses, Mortsafes, andPublic Vaults in Aberdeenshire Churchyards, formerly used for theProtection of the Dead from the resurrectionists,” Society ofAntiquaries of Scotland, Volume 46 (1911-12): 298.

11. Suzie Lennox, Bodysnatchers: Digging Up the Untold Stories ofBritain’s Resurrection Men (Barnsley, uK: Pen and Sword, 2016).

12. The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend (April1888).

13. “Archaeologists in West Bromwich find grave robbing evidence,”BBC, January 17, 2013, bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-21044770.

14. James ritchie, “relics of the Body-Snatchers: Supplementary Noteson Mortsafe Tackle, Mortsafes, Watch-houses, and Public Vaults,mostly in Aberdeenshire,” Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,Volume 55 (1920-21): 221-29.

15. James ritchie, “An Account of the Watch-houses, Mortsafes, andPublic Vaults in Aberdeenshire Churchyards, formerly used for theProtection of the Dead from the resurrectionists,” Society ofAntiquaries of Scotland, Volume 46 (1911-12): 326.

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36

Making a Museum: Eustis HouseKarla Rosenstein

preservation Diary

“I’ve been wondering what this place looked like inside for myentire life!” is a common refrain from visitors to the EustisEstate Museum and Study Center in Milton, Massachusetts.perched atop a hill, the striking stone mansion has capturedthe imaginations of locals for generations. This mysteryendured because the house was privately owned by theoriginal family until it was purchased by Historic NewEngland. Our organization undertook an extensive restoration

project to transform this grand family home into a museum,which opened to the public in May 2017.

It lives up to the imagination. The house is a gem ofAesthetic Movement taste, which was the height of fashionwhen it was built in 1878. The remarkably intact interiorsinclude richly carved woodwork, dramatic stained glasswindows, and a great hall soaring three stories to a decorativetrussed ceiling. The restored wall treatments, highlighted by

View of Gus Eustis reading in the parlor, photographed by William Ellery Channing Eustis, c. 1890. Courtesy of Historic New England,

WINNer OF THe 201 VSA PreSerVATION AWArDfor the state-of-the-art exterior and interior restoration by Historic New England of this 1878 Queen Anne mansion

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metallic paints, glitter and glow when illuminated by ornatebrass chandeliers.

The project took years of intensive planning, construction,and restoration to create a public museum with modernamenities and a visitor experience designed to be innovativeand inclusive. Traditional guided tours of the house andexhibition spaces are complemented by self-guided tours that,with the use of technology, allow visitors to design their ownexperience.

Historic and Architectural SignificanceThe Eustis Estate, comprising eighty acres of land and sixmajor buildings and structures, is an archetype of the pastoral,park-like residential estates that developed around Bostonduring the late nineteenth century. The thirty-four-room brickand stone Queen Anne mansion was the year-round residenceof William Ellery Channing Eustis and Edith HemenwayEustis. The property remained in the family for threegenerations.

The Eustis Estate is a monumental work of architectWilliam Ralph Emerson that exhibits an emphasis oncraftsmanship that defined Victorian-era architectural styles.This is an early work of Emerson’s, designed at the beginningof the most productive period of his career, and is one of thefew residences he designed in stone. The firms he employedfor the interiors reflect the pinnacle of Boston craftsmanshipand design: W. J. Mcpherson stained glass; Lewis and Lane

terra cotta; L. Haberstroh and Son decorative painting; andLow art tiles.

Ernest W. Bowditch’s 1879 design of the groundsemphasized the mansion’s prominence as well as views of theBlue Hills south of the mansion and the bucolic farm setting tothe east. The landscape also features a series of structuresincluding an electrical power house, a gatehouse, and a boilerhouse for the former greenhouses.

Restoration and Adaptive ReuseThe Eustis family moved out of the home in 2014 and HistoricNew England purchased the property directly from them.Anonymous donors generously funded the acquisition andstart-up costs, as well as an endowment to cover operatingexpenses. The local community was very supportive of theacquisition because it ensured that eighty acres of land wouldnever be developed and no public funds were involved.

The project started by documenting the condition of thebuildings and cataloging the objects that remained. Thisprovided a clear picture of what needed to be accomplished togo from private residence to public museum. As with manyrestoration projects, the majority of the work goes unseen. Thefirst phase involved the essential—though hidden—upgradesfor septic, electrical, and data, plus a new HVAC system toprotect the collections. Life safety equipment, a chair lift, andaccessible bathrooms were installed to comply with safetycodes and the Americans with Disabilities Act—no easy feat in

The Eustis Estate, Milton, Massachusetts, shortly after completion, c. 1880. Courtesy of Historic New England.

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a historic building. The project also included converting a1970 garage into a visitor center with a parking lot andtransforming a gatehouse into staff offices.

The more visible phase of interior restoration began in2016 and involved talented twenty-first century craftspeopleto complement the work done by the nineteenth century ones.When Historic New England acquired the property, most ofthe rooms had been painted with modern, light-colored latexpaint. The Aesthetic Movement’s extensive use of motifsinspired by nature are apparent throughout the house, in thewoodwork, decorative tiles, and stained glass. To restore the

overall effect, it was essential to return the colors in theprincipal rooms to their Victorian splendor.

To learn more about the original interiors, experts fromInternational Fine Arts Conservation Studios (IFACS) workedto understand what was beneath the modern paint. Usingmicroscopic paint analysis, conservators discovered that the

original paint treatments were true to the aesthetic of the day.The deep earth-tone colors—highlighted with metallicpaints—were chosen to complement the rich woodwork,accentuating Emerson’s architectural design. Designed toshimmer and glow in the gas light, the metallic paints and thedeep wall colors of red, green, and amber were executed byskilled hands.

The Aesthetic paint finishes were meticulously restoredusing authentic materials and methods: hand-groundpigments built up in layers as they would be on a paintedcanvas. Despite the demands of the work and how time-

consuming this was, Mary Aldrich, IFACS chief conservatorrecognized the importance of using traditional paints,especially on a project like the Eustis Estate. “Hand-groundpaints have a quality of color and finish that can’t be replicatedwith modern commercial paints,” she said. “When appliedwith a brush, hand-ground paint has a soft quality that

Clockwise from top: IFACS team members restoring the dining room paint and applying gold leaf to arch in the living hall; Historic New England staffmember cleaning sixteenth-century Spanish tile in the parlor; Diane Rousseau conserving a stained glass window designed by W. J. Mcpherson.Courtesy of Historic New England.

accentuates the beauty of old plaster walls.” These dramaticpaint colors enhance stained glass work in the entry anddining room and the intricately carved and etched designsused throughout the house on the grand staircase, woodenmantels, built-in cabinets, and fireplace surround tiles.

Though the house had been lovingly cared for, some of thatstained glass was showing signs of strain. Mcpherson createdlarge panels of leaded glass in the double doors leading intothe main living hall. These doors were opened and closedthousands of times since 1878 and the many small pieces ofglass were starting to weaken and bow outward. It was clear

that long-term preservation required the attention of aspecialized conservator. Diane Rousseau (fromMassachusetts, just like the original designer) wascommissioned to handle the task and she developed aconservation plan that is unique to these panels, taking intoconsideration Historic New England’s approach topreservation. “Minimum intervention, with enoughrestoration and restructuring to accommodate the panels’intended use” is the strategy she employed.

There are at least nine different woods used in the intricatewoodwork throughout the house. It was in excellent conditionconsidering three generations of children grew up here. Even

so, a detailed cleaning and application of wax was needed tohighlight the details of the carving and bring out the luster ofthe materials. That is easier said than done when there iselaborate paneling in nearly every room and fourteen carvedmantels. It was also necessary to refinish 7,000 square feet offlooring to protect it from the increased traffic it would receivein its new life as a museum.

Making a MuseumTwo rooms of original furnishings were included with the saleof the property. Since the rest of the house needed to be

furnished, it was a unique opportunity to create an innovativevisitor experience. period-appropriate furnishings wereacquired with the intent that visitors use them for seating andrelaxation, experiencing rooms as the family did. The house isdesigned to be available to visitors independent of guidedtours, with interactive touch screens in each room. The web-based technology presents an opportunity to share stories,archival photographs, videos about the restoration, and detailsabout the history of the house and the many artisans whoworked on it.

Additionally, several bedrooms on the second floor havebeen turned into gallery spaces for rotating exhibitions to

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IFACS team members testing historical paint colors after analysis. Courtesy of Historic New England.

Karla Rosenstein is site manager of the eustis estate, where she managesthe museum, public programming, local marketing, and serves as theliaison to the community. Previously, she worked at the PreservationSociety of Newport County and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holdsa BA in art history from university of California, San Diego, and MA inhistory of art and archaeology from New York university’s Institute of FineArts.

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Dining room after restoration was completed. photo by Eric Roth. Courtesy of Historic New England.

Exterior views of the Eustis Estate and the front entrance under theporte-cochere. photo by Eric Roth. Courtesy of Historic New England.

highlight Historic New England’s extensive collection ofobjects. This is a wonderful opportunity to tell new storiesfrom the region’s long history. The current exhibition (untilFebruary 24, 2019)—Head to Toe: Hat and Shoe Fashionsfrom Historic New England—explores the creation of thesefashion accessories and their effect on New England’seconomy, workforce, and environment.

During the first year of operation, we have worked tobecome a vital part of the community. The public programsnot only focus on the house but highlight our beautifulproperty with everything from vintage baseball games tosummer concerts. In decorating for our Victorian Christmascelebrations, we worked with the local garden clubs to createincredible live arrangements throughout the house. Thesuccess of the opening year has been gratifying and therecognition from the Victorian Society in America with itspreservation award for the restoration project is atremendous honor. We hope you come to see this marvel foryourself.

h

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The Bibliophilist

The Rural Cemetery Movement:Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century AmericaJeffrey Smith. Lanham, M. D.: Lexington Books, 2017.

When I discovered the Fall 2018 issue of this magazinewould be featuring death as its primary subject, I waspleased but wary. Although I was eager to read thisbook, I feared that the topic of rural cemeteries couldprove dour. I am happy to admit that I was wrong.Smith’s work had me reading late into the night,completely enthralled by the author’s convincingargument that cemeteries were places of paradox.Smith’s book creates a vivid story of the rural cemeterymovement that should be read, even inhaled, bygeneralist scholars of nineteenth-century America andspecialists in historic cemeteries.

Smith’s primary argument is best laid out in hisintroduction:

rural cemeteries came to represent…a greatparadox–they were ‘rural’ yet urban, sacred yetsecular, burial places for the dead but used regularlyby the living, natural yet manicured.

Because of a variety of concerns over the unsanitaryconditions and disrepair associated with burial groundsadjacent to urban churches, rural cemeteries, locatedbetween two and five miles outside of the city center,developed. Following the opening of Mount Auburnoutside of Boston in the 1830s, these cemeteriesflourished, especially in the mid-nineteenth century.Through his extensive use of primary source material,Smith is quite successful in describing the shift towardsrural cemeteries.

Furthermore, Smith provides insight into a side ofthe cemetery movement many of his fellow scholars donot: cemeteries as business ventures. Often, writing onrural cemeteries focuses on the architectural marvels,the beautiful landscapes, and the famous individualsinterred in those cemeteries. We would rather readabout the symbols of everlasting life on headstones orthe reflections of romanticism in the landscape design.The cost of a plot or the rules and regulations governingupkeep are not usually popular topics, but Smith makesthese subjects far from boring. I was particularlyengaged by his discussion of the rise of cemeteries astourist attractions and the marketing methods used toentice desirable people to purchase family plots. Hesheds light on how the industrial revolution affected thepopularity of cemeteries as destinations; a trip to thecemetery was an outing to the country. This trend

prompted governing councils to issue new rulebookshighlighting codes of behavior for a new middle andlower-class patron (who they often believed to be lessthan civilized). I also immensely enjoyed discussions ofhow the fascination with flora and fauna played roles inthe developing of the names of cemeteries and their“streets” – yet another selling point. The entire book isfilled with interesting facts like these. I was impressedwith both the amount and quality of material he used,particularly when discussing the marketing techniquesused by cemeteries for attracting both tourists andpotential purchasers in the late nineteenth century.

This book was published in 2017 and I recommendreading it alongside another, related recent publication:James Cothran and Erica Danylchak’s GraveLandscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural CemeteryMovement. This book includes numerous imagesdepicting items such as postcards, maps, andstereographs. Smith’s book has very limited images, allin black and white. This is likely a reflection of thepublisher’s concern with costs, and should not be heldagainst the author. personally, I did not feel Smith’sbook needed pictures, but the lack of images isremedied by Cothran and Danylchak.

I highly recommend this work to even the mostspecialist scholar of cemeteries. Smith’s writing is easyto follow and succinct. His source material isinformative and intriguing. Smith effortlesslyreconciles the cemetery movement as a business trendwith the rise of social and cultural change in nineteenthcentury America. It is a gem.

Reviewed by Jaclyn Spainhour

Jaclyn Spainhour is an author, historian, and the Director ofthe Hunter House Victorian Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. Sheserves on the Board of Directors of the VSA, the Chair of itsBook Awards committee, and the Copy editor of thispublication.

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Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the CanvasDonna M. Lucey, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Sumptuous gowns, entrancing settings and an overallethereal quality are depicted in the portraits of the fourwomen addressed in this book. It is the usual SargentStyle: beautiful ladies in beautiful clothes just beingbeautiful. This book is a compendium of fourbiographies that tell the real stories behind Sargent’smagic canvases. Who would think that behind all theSargentian loveliness was many a tale of deep sadness?This is sadness that comes from lives lived with adetermined passion and assertiveness unusual in thenineteenth-century woman.

The first and youngest is Elsie palmer, of the big eyesand doleful mien. She sat for her portrait at ageseventeen. Looking lost, forlorn and miserable, herwhite dress almost resembles a shroud. Sargent’sportrait not only depicts her present life but foretellsher future one. Elsie was raised to be a handmaiden toa sickly mother with social and artistic aspirations. Herfather had made his money in the Wild West ofColorado and Mrs. palmer wanted out of that scene.Using her heart condition as an excuse, she took herselfand Elsie to London. Here they enjoyed the company of“the cultured.” Elsie continued her subservience untilher mother died. She was then summoned back toColorado to wait on her now paralyzed and demandingfather. Finally, Elsie escaped by marrying Leo Myers, ayounger man. They had been secretly engaged for sometime. For her wedding Elsie wore a long brown robe“covered in huge buckles and bronze figures ofanimals.” It was most peculiar. Leo eventuallycommitted suicide and Elsie ended up back in England,taking long walks in the country...alone.

perhaps the most curious section is that on SallyFairchild, a redhead beauty whose Boston family wasfriends with Sargent’s family for many years. Swathedin a heavy veil, Sally is presented in profile and reallycould be anybody. One gets the impression that there ismore to be told here. Apparently, that was not case asshe lived a rather ordinary Boston matron’s life. Until,at the age of 80, she seduced a 30-year-old marriedman! Using Sally as a jumping off point, the authorswitches to Sally’s sister Lucia. Although not as strikingas Sally, Lucia was the interesting one. Despite parentalwishes, she became an artist and married one, HenryBrown Fuller. She worked in large scale; she painted amural for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Andshe worked in small scale; she founded the AmericanSociety of Miniature painters. Moreover, she won abronze medal at the paris Exposition of 1900, andmedals in other world’s fairs. Because her lazy tom-cathusband felt it was beneath him to work and onlypainted when so moved, Lucia supported him and theirchildren. Tragically, Lucia became blind and paralyzedwith multiple sclerosis, and died before she was 50. Inletters and diaries, Lucia makes much of the fact that

her children were her redemption. They were extremelyloving and devoted.

Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler’s tale culminateswith her love affair with her best friend's husband,lawyer and writer Jack Chapman. But Lucey calls thechapter on Elizabeth The Madonna and for goodreason; her early years were saintly. After her motherdied when she was nine, Elizabeth was responsible forher seven younger siblings. During her teens, Elizabethsuffered a severe hip problem, and the remedy wasbeing strapped to a board for two excruciatingly painfulyears. No one expected her to marry. Beautiful andsuffering she soldiered on. Then along came JackChapman. Romance and scandal bloomed. Eventually,after much intrigue, they married.

The apogee of the book is the chapter on IsabellaStewart Gardner. Famous for flouting Boston’s sternsocial norms, Isabella flirted outrageously with any manwho crossed her path and more shockingly dancedoften with men who were not her husband. She eveninvited scantily clad prizefighters to tea! At one eveningparty she descended the staircase wearing twoenormous diamonds attached to gold spiral wires atopher head that, knowing that the diamonds would boband sparkle as she talked. Despite all the flirting andfrivolity Isabella went on to found the very serious andstill important Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum inBoston.

What about these four women inspired the author?In an interview with Elle magazine, Lucey says shechose these particular women “because they were notafraid to say...I am going to be who I am....” Indeedthese four were fiercely themselves and theirfascinating exploits make most entertaining reading.

Reviewed by Anne-Taylor Cahill

Anne-Taylor Cahill is a professor of philosophy at OldDominion university in Norfolk, Virginia, and serves on thenational board of the Victorian Society in America. She is alsofounding member and former president of the eloise HunterChapter of the VSA. She often writes the Milestones columnfor this magazine.

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In the grand narrative of American architecture,philadelphia usually plays a supporting role, withBoston, New York, Washington, D. C., Chicago, and LosAngeles assuming the lead at various times. Two newbooks by noted architectural historian George E. Thomasaim to subvert this narrative. First Modern:Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and FrankFurness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machinesboth argue for the primacy of philadelphia and itsmanufacturing titans, along with their preferredarchitect, Frank Furness (1839-1912), in nurturingmodern architecture in the second half of the nineteenthcentury. Thomas knows his subjects thoroughly, havingauthored and/or co-authored several books onphiladelphia architecture and on Furness, includingFrank Furness: The Complete Works (1991, revised1996). While Thomas considerably enlarges the contextfor understanding Furness’s wide-ranging practice, hismost salient contribution is in rooting the architect’smyriad creative impulses within the industrialmetropolis itself.

Furness has, alternately, been reviled and praised forhis design excesses, only being recognized as a creativeprodigy around 1973, when, with modernist orthodoxyon the wane, the philadelphia Museum of Art awardedhim a long-overdue retrospective exhibition. This ledindirectly to the restoration of his first majorcommission, the pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,in time for its centennial and the nation’s bicentennial.First Modern is a paean to the Academy building.Lavishly illustrated and printed on quality paper stock inan oversized format, the book is nevertheless a carefullyresearched monograph that delves deeply into thebuilding’s functional planning and idiosyncratic design.

Thomas leads the reader through the maze ofpreliminary decisions reached by the Academy’s board ofdirectors, including the selection of Furness and hispartner George Wattson Hewitt after a close competitionand their building’s subsequent design and construction,which was kept on a flexible schedule in anticipation of“comparatively unsolved difficulties.” The shift in theboard’s membership from the older, mercantile elite tothe younger, industrial elite certainly influencedFurness, who quickly assumed leadership over thedesign. Board member and artist John Sartain waslargely responsible for the Academy’s innovative layout:studios on the lower level lit by a continuous north-facing skylight and galleries above lit by individualskylights. The incorporation of iron framing in fellow

board member Joseph Harrison, Jr.’s RittenhouseSquare townhouse, a design by the older architectSamuel Sloan, may have steered Furness toward the useof this modern material. Moreover, it was board memberand building committee chairman Fairman Rogers, abridge engineer with connections to the University ofpennsylvania and the Franklin Institute, who may havehelped Furness arrive at the Academy’s most pioneeringstructural advance: a massive iron truss in four sectionsthat carries the considerable weight and spans the nearly200’ length of the upper galleries’ brick clerestory wall.precedents for the Academy’s Broad Street façade, acolorful and provocative fusion of the Victorian Gothicand the Second Empire, abound. By the early 1870s, bothstyles had been chosen by leading American artinstitutions for their new buildings: the former for theBoston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museumof Art, and the National Academy of Design and thelatter for the Corcoran Gallery of Art. To these, Furnessinfused his own interpretation of the Neo-Grec, anexperimental variant of classicism popularized inNapoleon III’s paris and transmitted stateside via hisFrench-educated mentor Richard Morris Hunt. Thefaçade is, in Thomas’s words, “a visual compendium ofhistorical and global styles drawn from chronologicallydistant worlds.” Gothic tracery, classical metopes,patterned brickwork and stonework, and machine-likecolonettes and brackets all vie for the attention ofpassersby. The new building opened in April 1876–justahead of the Centennial Exhibition in nearby Fairmountpark–to a somewhat indifferent reception. Onecontemporary critic deemed its exterior a “patchwork”and, while admiring its functional interior planning, helargely overlooked its structural innovations.

Frank Furness builds solidly upon the researchThomas initially gathered for First Modern. It is neithera biography–that territory having been comprehensivelyexplored by Michael J. Lewis in Frank Furness:Architecture and the Violent Mind–nor an architecturalsurvey in the manner of the Complete Works. Rather, itis an insightful and compact study–divided into fourchapters and bookended by a prologue and anepilogue–of what Thomas calls philadelphia’s“ecological frame” vis-à-vis Furness’s own developmentas an architect. By this reasoning, Furness’s habitat wasindustrial philadelphia, which had been knownpopularly from the colonial period as the “Quaker City,”but which would recast itself ambitiously in thenineteenth century as the “workshop of the world.”

First Modern: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsGeorge e. Thomas. Foreword by David r. Brigham and Chronolgy by Isaac Kornblatt-Stier. Philadelphia:Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; distributed by the university of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great MachinesGeorge e. Thomas. Foreword by Alan Hess. Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania, 2018.

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Furthermore, the looming presence of transcendentalistphilosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a close family friend,predisposed the young architect toward a creative expressionbound in both nature and the material demands of the modernage.

New institutions and changes at existing institutions drove thistransformation. Founded in 1824, the Franklin Institute was arelative newcomer among the city’s many associations, but, owingto an egalitarian membership policy, it soon became the center ofprofessional scientific inquiry. Significantly, its board drove theorganizing and planning for the Centennial Exhibition, the largestcelebration of industry and technology attempted up until thattime, ultimately attracting millions of national and internationalvisitors to the city. Likewise, the University of pennsylvania, whichhad been established more than a century earlier, shifted itseducational mission around the time of the Civil War from thestudy of the classics to the study of applied science andengineering. Furness’s patrons were largely drawn from amongthis new class of scientists and engineers. They were individualswho worked hard and built considerable fortunes, and their workethic permeated even the era’s new leisure activities on whichFurness, obligingly, bestowed muscular forms. As Thomasobserves of the Undine Barge Club:

In a building dedicated to the pleasures of physical effort, theeffort of spanning, load bearing, and carrying were given thelead architectural roles.

In 1873, Louis Sullivan famously spent a few months as a youngdraftsman in Furness’s employ, vividly recounting in hisautobiography that the senior architect “made buildings out of hishead.” Departing somewhat from the standard historical narrative,Thomas ascribes to Furness a pivotal part when discussingSullivan’s subsequent career in the Midwest, a part greater than

even, the robust, Romanesque-revival style of H. H. Richardson.In Sullivan’s late bank projects, furthermore, Thomas findssurprising echoes of Furness’s early banking halls. At times,Thomas even verges on reimagining the traditional triumvirate ofearly modern American architecture–Richardson, Sullivan, andFrank Lloyd Wright–with Furness replacing Richardson as theirforebear and philadelphia replacing Chicago as their ancestralhome.

Narratives are not so easily rewritten, however, andgenealogies not so clearly delineated. Thomas posits that the threemen may have actually met in 1892 in Sullivan’s Chicago office,where Wright was, in remarkably parallel fashion, working as ayoung draftsman. At the time Furness was on official assignmentto inspect the construction of the World’s Columbian Exposition,whose tasteful, academic classicism was in many ways arepudiation of his own life’s work and philadelphia’s industrialaesthetic. Whether they recognized in each other at that moment akindred sensibility is not known. What is known is that, accordingto an eyewitness account more than sixty years later, Wrightproclaimed Furness’s library at the University of pennsylvania tobe “the work of an artist.” Wright apparently recognized in Furnessthe same Emersonian impulse to unite natural and modern formsthat lay behind his own work. perhaps it is the philosopher, ratherthan the architect, who should be proclaimed the true “firstmodern.” In any case, Thomas’ books give us rich new insights intoFurness, philadelphia and the course of modern architecture.

Reviewed by Robert Wojtowicz

Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossingselizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, with Dorothy Mahon, Christopher riopelle and ShannonVittoria. New York City: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018.

Picturesque and Sublime:Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic InheritanceTim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, Sophie Lynford, Jennifer raab and Nicholas robbins. Catskill, N. Y. and New Haven, C. T. and London: Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Yale university Press, 2018.

These two exhibition catalogs delve deep into thenature and consequences of Thomas Cole’s inheritanceand interactions with art, artists and the landscapeacross the Atlantic. This is a new avenue of inquiry. Coleis known as a self-taught artist, the “father” of HudsonRiver School, the first and still the most distinctivelyAmerican art movement. In fact, Cole was born innorthern England, where industry boomed, cities

became overcrowded and dirty, and labor unrest ranrampant. His father failed as a textile manufacturer,and 1818 the family came to the United States seekingnew business opportunities. In his thirty years as anAmerican artist, Cole made two extended trips toEngland and Italy (along with brief passes throughFrance) to study the art of old and contemporarymasters and the European landscape, especially its

Robert Wojtowicz is professor of art history and dean of theGraduate School at Old Dominion university in Norfolk,Virginia. He is an expert on the life and work of architecturaland urban critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990).

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hallowed cultural landmarks. Both catalogs put Cole’s artworksalongside these foreign forbearers and experiences. Cole’s self-proclaimed quest to paint a “higher style” of landscape is thusrevealed to be profoundly affected by his trans-Atlanticinfluences and context.

In each book the catalog entries, as a group, substantiate theexhibition’s premises. Both publications organize the entries intowell-articulated themes, with each artwork illustrated anddiscussed thoroughly. The catalog from the MetropolitanMuseum of Art uses a thematic arrangement based on the phasesof Cole’s life and travels, with Cole’s work surrounded by worksthat directly influenced him or contextualize him. The catalogfrom the Thomas Cole National Historic Site is a more focusedlook at how prints–from fine engravings to illustrations ininstructional manuals–transmitted the aesthetic categories ofthe picturesque and the sublime. Not surprisingly, the Met’scatalog is lavish, with color images on nearly every page and allthe apparatus of an academic volume, including a finebibliography. The catalog from the much smaller Thomas ColeNational Historic Site is equally ambitious, in its narrower scope.Its very fine reproductions of mezzotints, aquatints, and otherkinds of prints convey all the nuances of these works,communicating the aesthetic strategies that influenced Cole.

The essays in the Met’s catalog examine the finer points ofCole’s career. In a largely biographical essay, Barringer showshow Cole’s experiences on both sides of the Atlantic shaped hisperceptions of the American landscape and its potential to carrymeaning. Barringer ends the essay with an extended look atCole’s masterwork, “The Oxbow,” with its two painted queries:the giant question mark formed by the path of the ConnecticutRiver and Cole’s self-portrait looking out at us quizzically.Barringer states Cole’s implicit questions:

…is it possible to balance the pursuit of wealth with thepreservation of the God-given wilderness, to temper thematerial with the spiritual, industry with art?

While painting his series The Course of Empire, Cole paused,took the central panel, The Consummation of Empire, andpainted over it, creating The Oxbow. Kornhauser shows howthese two images are not only physically but programmaticallymelded. Both are painted versions of Cole’s publication “Essayon American Scenery,” a call to reject Jacksonian expansionism.As a compliment to Kornhauser’s art historical analysis, paintingconservator Mahon looks deep into The Oxbow and TheConsummation of Empire, using infrared imaging andmicroscopic examination of paint layers to give us technical dataon the linked processes by which Cole created the two paintings.Riopelle examines Cole and plein air oil sketching, a practiceinformed by his European travels. Cole learned from JohnConstable, Joseph Mallord William Turner and expatriates inRome, including Scandinavian painters and the FrenchmanCamille Corot. In turn, Cole introduced the landscape oil sketchto his pupil Frederic Edwin Church, who really ran with it. Adetailed chronology of Cole’s life by Vittoria tracks hismovements around the globe, a good underpinning for the entirecatalog from the Met.

The principle essay of the Cole House catalog, “AnInheritance in print: Thomas Cole and the Aesthetics ofLandscape,” is an overview of the entire book. This long essay, byBarringer and Raab, rambles through Cole’s biography, thedevelopment of the picturesque aesthetic by Claude Lorrain and

Salvator Rosa, the development of the sublime by literarytheoreticians as well as artists, and Cole’s absorption of it all,primarily through the medium of prints. The essay culminateswith an analysis of Cole’s oil Catskill Mountain House: The FourElements, which shows the hotel suspended above a crag, bathedin an eerie light while being assaulted by a torrential rainstormand a forest fire. The painting is Cole’s sermon on “the aestheticsof the sublime, classical cosmology and environmentalcatastrophe” falling on the deaf ears of the frivolous tourists inthe hotel. In this catalog focused on the print, Robbins essay is anappropriate examination of Cole’s engagement with varied formsof printed paper. Robbins discovers that in his journal, Colecopied out passages from a poem on the proportions of thehuman body, a bit of writing quoted by two premierartist/theoreticians: the seventeenth-century Frenchman Rogerde piles and the eighteenth-century Englishman JoshuaReynolds. By this action, Cole aligns himself with generations ofEuropean artistic pedagogy. The essay by Lynford compares Coleto his friend and colleague William Guy Wall, and their differentdepictions of Hudson River scenery. Ultimately Wall shows theland as an arcadia that can be improved through thoughtfuldevelopment by mills, steamboats, tourism and other commerce.Cole sees this same arcadia under threat by the same forces ofcommerce.

There are many delights and surprises scattered in the pagesof these two publications. Two entries in the Met’s catalogdocument colorful objects: a cartoon of the mythical Ned Luddand a book of calico samples. These are material evidence ofCole’s childhood and his father’s trade in the tumultuous textileindustry in Lancashire. The Cole House catalog gives us a look atrare and important prints, especially ones with direct ties tomasters Cole admired. Claude Lorrain made drawings to recordhis oeuvre, and these were bound in a book that came to beknown as the Liber Veritas. One of Richard Earlom’s engravings,a fine etching and mezzotint after plate 23 of the Liber Veritas, isincluded. In emulation of Claude, Turner created his own set ofdrawings for engraving, calling it the Liber Studiorum; two ofthese are included. The Hudson River Portfolio, a volume withtext by John Agg and aquatints by John Hill after William GuyWall’s watercolors influenced Cole and the course of Americanlandscape painting, but it is rarely given the analysis it deservesand receives in Lynford’s essay and the entries in the Cole Housecatalog. Finally, both catalogs examine Cole’s anthropomorphicdrawings of tree trunks, which became a motif to portray his ownfeelings about nature.

To be sure, the books have flaws. There is much repetition,not only between the books but within each one. Bothpublications are so big and so lavishly illustrated, and thematerial brought to bear is so diverse that I found it easy to losetrack of the arguments or judge their effectiveness. For example,I was stopped short by an illustration of Jacque Louis David’sNapoleon Crossing Alps in a catalog entry on Turner’s SnowStorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. The Turnerpainting is included because Cole emulated his cloud effects. AndTurner’s painting may well allude to Napoleon’s ill-fated trek,but this tangent into a discussion of how Turner and Daviddepicted empire builders is a distraction from the main story:Cole. In the Met’s catalog, especially, huge paintings by Claudeand Turner are scaled down to fit the pages of the book, whiletiny oil sketches by Constable are scaled up, distorting ourunderstanding of these artworks and how they must have beenexperienced by Cole. Given both catalog’s preoccupation with

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aesthetic categories of the picturesque and sublime, I am puzzledby the reluctance of either to discuss the related category of thebeautiful–a label often applied to very artworks cataloged here.(More peculiar is Barringer’s and Raab’s tendency to class Rosa’sworks as picturesque rather than sublime.) Furthermore, bothcatalogs cite specific works as influences upon Cole, but do notalways provide corroborating evidence. For example, no explicitconnection is cited between Cole and paul Sandby in the ColeHouse catalog, even it includes five engravings after hiswatercolors. And one may disagree with the readings ofpaintings. In particular, The Oxbow, seen by Barringer andKornhauser as a warning of impending overdevelopment, couldas easily be read as a celebration of American agriculturebringing order out of the chaos of the wilderness. Indeed,generations of nationalist art historians have seen the paintingthis way.

But, all told, these deep dives into Cole’s relationship with histrans-Atlantic heritage and experiences expand ourunderstanding of his work. The main arguments are convincing.Cole’s celebration of the American wilderness was based on thedevastating effects of industrialization he witnessed in England,and his renditions of doomed empires derive from the ruined

aqueducts of Italy and the castles of Wales. The aesthetics of thepicturesque and the sublime were conventions used to depictlong-populated landscapes and elevate the genre of landscapepainting. Cole’s genius was to adapt these conventions to theAmerican landscape, in order to convey higher truths about thecourse of American civilization. These publications demonstratethat Cole is both deeply cosmopolitan and profoundly American.

Reviewed by Karen Zukowski

Karen Zukowski is an independent historian of American visualculture, and the book review editor of this publication. She is co-editor, with Julia rosenbaum, of Frederic Church’s Olana on theHudson (rizzoli, 2018).

Known as the “Blue Death,” the “Asian Disease” and the “price ofEmpire,” cholera decimated thousands of nineteenth centuryLondoners. The effects of cholera were nearly instantaneous;vomiting, diarrhea and death by dehydration. Because the severedehydration caused the body to take on a desiccated blue-gray toneit was called the “Blue Death.” Mortality would usually occurwithin twenty-four hours of the disease’s violent onset. Cholerawas originally referred to as the “Asian Disease” in 1817 as it spreadfrom the Ganges Delta in India to the rest of the world. When theBritish Empire expanded, cholera spread along its trade routes.Major waterways and railways enhanced the spread. The pressasked “Is this the price of Empire?”

In Great Britain the Industrial Revolution drove more and morepeople into London, which was splitting at the seams. Familieswere crowded into homes (sometimes twenty in one room).Sanitation was virtually nonexistent. Over 200,000 cesspoolsexisted in London. These were holes for human waste in the backyard or under houses. There was no such thing as trash collection.public animal markets and open slaughterhouses exacerbated theproblem. Often animal waste (from horses primarily) was simplyleft to rot in the streets. This was a recipe for disaster.

The medical community was baffled. Two schools of thoughtdebated the issue: Contagionists believed cholera was spread fromperson to person by direct contact; Miasmatists believed cholera“hung in the ether in unsavory places.” The Board of Health issueda statement to the effect that the poor and “those addicted tospirituous liquors” were responsible for the spread of the disease.The populace was advised to wear a bag filled with myrrh andcamphor so as to be “surrounded by an aromatic atmosphere.”

London’s Sanitation Commissioner, Sir Edwin Chadwickbelieved cholera to be the result of “atmospheric impurities”resulting from waste rotting in the streets. He decreed the city’scesspools should be closed. Unfortunately, the few sewers thatexisted were overwhelmed. Thus, what had been contained in200,000 cesspools was directed into the Thames River; the sameriver that was London’s main water supply.

In direct opposition to Chadwick, Dr. John Snow (1813-1858)discounted both the Contagionists and the Miasmatists. Hisobservations and interviews with people in the neighborhoodsmost affected by cholera led to a completely different conclusion.Dr. Snow identified the Broad Street water pump as the primarysource of London’s cholera. Using a dot matrix system he was ableto identify a cluster of victims around the pump. He was convincedof a connection between the water source and cholera.

Dr. Snow’s studies were enough to convince the local council toremove the handle of the Broad Street pump. The cholera began todiminish. According to his reports:

I found nearly all the (cholera) deaths had taken placewithin a short distance from the pump...there wereinstances in which the deceased persons used to drinkwater from the pump...In consequence of what I said thehandle of the pump was removed the following day.

Later it was discovered that the pump had been dug only threefeet from an old cesspool that leaked fecal bacteria. The cloth

diaper of an infant who had died from cholera had been washedinto this cesspool. This particular cesspool had been dug under ahouse that had burned down and when the city widened BroadStreet the location of the cesspool was forgotten. Because thecholera epidemic died down, the city replaced the handle of theBroad Street pump. To accept Dr. Snow’s theory meant the city wasaccepting responsibility for disease transmission. However, in1866 when another cholera epidemic occurred, one of Dr. Snow’schief opponents, Dr. William Farr, realized that Snow had beencorrect. He persuaded the city to issue orders that only boiledwater should be consumed.

Dr. John Snow was a man ahead of his time. Now consideredthe Father of Epidemiology, he was an early proponent ofanesthesia in childbirth and served as Queen Victoria’s anesthetist.In London a plaque honors Dr. Snow on Broadwich Street, and isdecorated with the image of a pump with its handle removed. InYork, a memorial pump sans handle was erected in 2017. The JohnSnow Society meets each September in London at the John Snowpub, where a member delivers the annual pump Handle lecture. Arecent lecture title was “What pump Handles Need to Be Removedto Save the Most Lives in This Century?”

47

Milestones

Dr. Snow and the Blue DeathAnne-Taylor Cahill

For further reading:

Spence Galbraith, Dr. John Snow, His Early Years ,(London: The Royal Institute of public Health and Hygiene,2002).

Robert D. Morris, The Blue Death, (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

Katherine Tansley, The Doctor of Broad Street (UnitedKingdom: Matador, 2016).

thejohnsnowsociety.org

L to R: Dr. John Snow and his map showing the cholera cases near theBroad Street water pump, 1854.

CALL for PAPERSNineteenth Centurymagazine is the peer-reviewed journal of The Victorian Society in America. Scholarlysubmissions are encouraged in the fields of cultural and social history of the United States dating from1837 to 1917. Nineteenth Century publishes regular features reflecting current research on architecture,fine arts, decorative arts, interior design, landscape architecture, biography and photography.

Guidelines for SubmissionsSubmissions should be from 2,000 to 6,000 words in length, with illustrations and end notes as necessary.Manuscripts shall conform to the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Manuscripts should be submittedas a Microsoft Word document. Illustrations should be formatted and submitted as either .jpg, .tiff, .eps or .pdf,300 dpi or greater. It shall be the responsibility of the author to secure the rights to publish all images. TheVictorian Society in America and the editors assume no responsibility for the loss or damage of any material.

Deadlines for SubmissionsJanuary 1 for publication in the Spring issue, and July 1 for publication in the Fall issue.

Email submissions to: Warren Ashworth, EditorNineteenthCenturyMagazine@gmail.com

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33

AN INVITATION TO JOINTHE VICTORIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA

48

The Victorian Society in AmericaPreSIDeNTKevin Rose, Springfield, OH

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eXeCuTIVe VICe-PreSIDeNTJohn J. Simonelli, paterson, NJ

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